THE IMPACT OF JOURNAL WRITING ON ACADEMIC ACHIEVEMENTS OF ADULT IRANIAN EFL (ENGLISH AS FOREIGN LANGUAGE) LEARNERS WITH LOW EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE (EI) INDEX

In this research, the intention was to testify ʹDialogue Journal Writingʹ (DJW) as an active reflective practice among adult learners with low Emotional Intelligence (EI). Among the various individual differences that the adult learners bring to the EFL classrooms, "EI" trait has been mostly focused upon as one social skill needed for learning a language. However, in a bulk of research, rarely have the researchers put emphasis on maximization through educational tools that they have had at their disposal. Here, the intention was to capitalize on low EI adult learnersʹ active and conscious role through active learner-teacher written dialogue communication. Thus, 126 adult academic students were randomly selected through cluster sampling from academic students and homogenized through a standardized Nelson TOEFL test. Through Bar-Onʹs EI questionnaire (1980), the target groups were screened. Studentsʹ performances were compared on two successive posttests after the treatment induction. The results indicated the outperformance of the experimental group for the two posttests. (Time 1: Sig. 2-tailed=.001 < 0.05 & time 2: 0.02 < 0.05). As to the interconnectivity effect of gender and EI level, the MANOVA results showed the outperformance of females over the males especially, at lower and medium EI just in the first post test. At last, two qualitative assessments including informal interviews and a semi structured questionnaire were triangulated with the results. The findings indicated that DJW could efficiently help adult EFL Iranian learners who suffer from lower EI to participate more in learning tasks and get better achievements. The pedagogical implications for utilizing DJW in EFL settings have been fully discussed at the end.