the relationship between iranian intermediate efl learners’ emotional intelligence and their willingness to communicate

Following the world war ii, english has changed into an international language among millions of people who speak english as their first, second or third language all over the world. however, knowing and using a language are accompanied by the ability to speak as well as willingness to communicate (wtc). there are different factors that affect on communication; emotional intelligence (ei) is one of those. given the importance of willingness to communicate and ei in increasing efl learners’ speaking ability, this study was an attempt to investigate the relationship between iranian efl learners’ emotional intelligence and their willingness to communicate. to this end, the researcher adopted a correlational design to investigate the primary goal of this investigation which was to explore the existence of any possible relationship between emotional intelligence and willingness to communicate. as to the conduct of the research, the willingness to communicate and emotional intelligence questionnaires were administrated to 60 intermediate efl learners who were chosen from among the students in sama language institute in aliabad katoul, golestan, iran. the willingness to communicate questionnaire developed by macintyre, baker, clement, and conrod (2001) was employed to assess the participants’ degree of willingness to communicate. also the emotional intelligence questionnaire developed by petrides and furnham (2006) was adopted to assess learners’ emotional intelligence. the findings obtained from pearson correlation revealed that there is a significant relationship between emotional intelligence and willingness to communication. in particular, the findings suggested a strong significant relationship between emotional intelligence and willingness to communicate outside the classroom. and the second research question is rejected so that there is relationship between emotional intelligence and inside the classroom willingness to communicate. the results of the present study tend to have a number of implications for administrators and teachers including better appreciation of efl learners’ emotional intelligence as well as increasing their outside-the-classroom opportunities.