The Relationship between EFL Teachers’ Emotional Intelligence and Students’ Motivational Attributes

This study explored the relationship between EFL (English as a foreign language) teachers’ emotional intelligence (EI) and their students’ motivational attributes. Additionally, it investigated the contribution of EFL teachers’ EI to students’ motivational factors. To these ends, 30 EFL teachers were selected through convenience sampling from language institutes in Najaf-Abad, and were asked to complete Bar-On’s Emotional Quotient Inventory. Then, Gardner’s Attitude/Motivation Test Battery was administered to 221 randomly selected EFL students from the teachers’ English courses in the language institutes. The results of bivariate correlation and multiple regression analyses revealed that there was a statistically significant and positive relationship between the teachers’ EI and their students’ motivational attributes. Moreover, Adaptability, Interpersonal, and General Mood, three competencies of teachers’ EI, were found to have higher correlations with the students’ motivational attributes. But the unique contributions of the above three EI subdomainsas well as Intrapersonal and Stress Management subdomains to the motivational factors were not statistically significant. In general, the teachers’ EI made a moderate contribution to the students motivation.