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Among the major milestones in the history of psychological attempts and psycholinguistic investigations lies the inception and outbreak of the contentious field of emotional intelligence in the mid 1990s. Although subsequent to its advent a profusion of diverse probes from several neighboring disciplines have been devoted to disentangling the true nature of this rather avant-garde doctrine, some aspects of EQ still seem to have been given scant attention in L2 learning research. One such partially neglected facet is thought to be the investigation of the role of intervention studies in enhancing EFL learners’ emotional intelligence. Thus, the present study aims to somehow bridge this ostensible gap in the literature on the issue by resorting to two innovative techniques of fuzzy thinking and SAFE (Sign-Assisted Feeling Expression). The results gained point to significant leaps in EFL learners’ level of emotional intelligence with regard to some particular subscales of Bar-On's EQ-i which are attributable to the effect of treatment on participants.       

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The present article, first, examines the relationship between EFL university students' critical thinking (CT) and emotional intelligence (EI). Second, the roles of gender and age as moderating factors in the relationship between students' CT and EI are investigated. Third, the relationships between students' age and gender with their EI are studied. To attain the goals of the research, 86 EFL students completed the "Watson-Glaser Critical Thinking Appraisal" (Form A) and the "Bar-On's EQ-i test". The findings of the study indicated that there was a significant relationship between EFL learners' CT and their EI. Among the components of EI, flexibility and social responsibility were found to have the highest correlations with CT and were also shown to be positive predictors of CT. The results also revealed that age and gender did not moderate the relationship between CT and EI. Furthermore, it was found that neither age nor gender played any significant roles in learners' level of EQ.

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Nowadays, teachers are receiving more attention in the studies done in mainstream education since it is believed that they play the most important role in educational settings, and therefore their different aspects, such as teacher efficacy, burnout, teaching style, and emotional intelligence, have received great attention. Moreover, demographic characteristics of teachers are more examined these days since they are thought to play major roles in teachers’ performance in the classroom. Despite great attention to different aspects of teachers and their demographics in mainstream education, such studies are rare in the English Language Teaching field. This study was therefore designed to explore possible relationships among English language teachers’ sense of efficacy, burnout, teaching style, and emotional intelligence on the one hand, and to document probable differences among them with respect to teachers’ gender, degree, and experience on the other hand. To this end, four different instruments, one for each of the variables, were administered among 264 Iranian English language teachers. The findings showed significant even though not high correlations among some of the components of teacher efficacy, burnout, teaching style, and emotional intelligence, as well as significant differences among some the components of these variables with respect to teachers’ gender, degree, and experience. The results of this study can help teacher educators in dealing with different teachers since they will know about the variations among teachers’ performances in the classroom and the problems any teacher with certain characteristics may have.  

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The development of different sub-competences of second/foreign language is affected by a variety of cognitive, personal, and social factors (Ellis, 1994). As for personal factors, a wide range of emotional variables have been incorporated into second language acquisition (SLA) studies however, emotional intelligence (EQ) is relatively new to this domain (Pishghadam, 2009). Given that EQ seems to affect EFL learners' interlanguage pragmatic competence (ILP) development due to the face-threatening nature of some of the speech acts involved and in an attempt to explore the nature of the tentative interrelationship, the researcher administered the Bar-On EQ-i (1996) questionnaire as an EQ measure, two ILP competence tests, and a TOEFL test to 52 Iranian EFL majors. The analyses results did not reveal any significant correlation between EQ, ILP competence and general English proficiency despite the evident strong correlation between the ILP and general English proficiency. Furthermore, the results did not feature EQ as an effective predictor of EFL learners' general English proficiency and ILP competence development level. The findings imply that EQ as a seemingly construct irrelevant factor to EFL learners' both foreign language proficiency and ILP development might not be rightly considered as an effective personal variable in EFL educational contexts.