INVESTIGATING THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE AND WRITING COMPLEXITY, ACCURACY, AND FLUENCY AMONG GRADUATE STUDENTS OF TEFL

The present study sought to investigate the relationship between emotional intelligence (ei) and writing complexity, accuracy, and fluency (caf) among graduate efl students. To this end, 124 participants (84 females and 40 males) were selected from ma students of teaching english as a foreign language (tefl). All participants were selected from six intact classes. To assess the participants' ei, bar-on's emotional quotient inventory (eqi) was administered. Also, the participants were asked to write an argumentative writing. The writing task was scored by two raters, yielding inter-rater reliability coefficients of 0.84, 0.87, and 0.94 for writing complexity, accuracy and fluency, respectively. The results of the pearson correlations revealed that ei had significantly positive relationships with writing complexity (r=.13, p<.05), writing accuracy (r=.15, p<.05) and writing fluency (r=.21, p<.05). among the subscales of ei, independence had the highest relationship with writing accuracy (r=.31, p<.05); problem solving had the strongest association with writing complexity (r=.39, p<.05); and flexibility had the maximum correlation with writing fluency (r=.43, p<.05). the findings have some illuminating implications for efl/esl practitioners.