The Relationship between Iranian EFL Learners Emotional Intelligence and Their Lexico-semantic Errors in Writing

Although English language teaching literature is replete with research on emotional intelligence and different aspects of reading, listening, speaking, writing, and vocabulary knowledge in different cultural contexts, it seems that there is still room to dwell on the possible relationship between emotional intelligence and learners lexico-semantic errors in writing in an EFL context. To this end, first, a group of 100 Iranian university students form PNU (Payam-e-Noor University) and IAU (Islamic Azad University) of Mahabad and Boukan were chosen through availability sampling method. The participants were junior and senior undergraduate students majoring in TEFL and English Language Translation. Then they were requested to fill out Bar-on’s Emotional Quotient Inventory (EQ-i, Bar-on, 1997). Besides, they were asked to write two short paragraphs on some topics offered by the researcher in order to identify their lexico-semantic errors they committed. Data were analyzed using Pearson correlation procedure. The results of the study indicated that EFL learners’ emotional intelligence level had a significant amount of correlation with their lexico-semantic errors. The findings can have some pedagogical implications for teachers.