The Relationship between EFL Instructors' Emotional Intelligence and Learners' Academic Achievement

With the growing interest in studying people's emotional information to guide thinking and behavior, the present study aimed at examining the emotional intelligence of EFL instructors and to find possible relations of instructors' emotional intelligence and their corresponding students' academic achievement. To this end, 20 EFL instructors were randomly selected from an Iranian language center (Academic Center for Education, Culture, and Research) and were asked to fill in the Bar-On EQ questionnaire, to be able to measure their emotional intelligence. In addition, 515 EFL students also participated in the study and their final exam score was used as an indication of their achievement level. SPSS (Statistical Package for Social sciences, version 21) was utilized to analyze the data and Pearson Correlation Coefficient was used to determine if a relationship could be proven between the two variables. Conclusions and pedagogical implications are discussed at the end