The disjunction of emotional intelligence and foreign language proficiency

This study attempted to investigate the relationship between emotional intelligence and linguistic competence of some Iranian learners of English in the areas of structure, written expression, vocabulary, reading comprehension, and composition. A forty-item test of linguistic proficiency secured from TOEFL preparatory books with the Cronbach’s Alpha reliability of 0.742, the thirty-three-item Schutte Emotional Intelligence Scale, and a task of writing in English were administered to 110 Iranian undergraduate students of English language and literature to elicit the necessary data for study and analysis. Seventy-nine respondents succeeded to finish the tests and the tasks. While there is much literature supporting the existence of a positive relationship between emotional intelligence and academic success, a series of Pearson correlation tests applied to the results from the proficiency test, the essay task, and emotional profiles of the participants did not indicate any significant positive relationship between their emotional intelligence scores and their scores on proficiency tests. The article discusses reasons for these counter-intuitive findings