The Relationship between Emotional Intelligence and Reading Comprehension among ELT Undergraduate Students

Psychological traits seem to have an effect on foreign language learning; consequently, the current study aims to examine the possible correlation between the emotional intelligence (EI) levels of the ELT undergraduate students and their reading achievement. Besides, the study explores whether there are any gender differences in terms of emotional intelligence levels as well as reading comprehension performance. This study attempts to answer these four research questions: (1) Is there any significant relationship between ELT university students’ emotional intelligence and their reading comprehension in English? (2) Which components of Emotional Intelligence can best predict ELT learners’ reading performance? (3) Is there any significant difference between the emotional intelligence levels according to gender among ELT university students? (4) Are there any gender differences according to ELT university students’ emotional intelligence level and their reading performance? This study utilized a quantitative research method. The participants of the study were 49 ELT undergraduate students from the Department of Foreign Language Education at Eastern Mediterranean University in North Cyprus. Schutte's (1998) Emotional Intelligence Scale was employed as a first data collection instrument to measure the participants’ EI levels. In addition, an IELTS reading test was used to identify the students’ reading proficiency. The data of the current study was analyzed through some statistical measures of the SPSS software: descriptive statistics, Pearson correlation and regression analysis formulas. The analysis revealed that there is a non-significant relationship between ELT university students’ emotional intelligence and their reading comprehension. In addition, the results of the four EI components proved that all of these four components were unable to predicate the reading achievement among the ELT undergraduate students. Besides, a non-significant difference in the emotional intelligence levels between the ELT undergraduate male and female students was noticed in this study. Furthermore, evidence showed that there were no significant difference gender difference in terms of the relationship between emotional intelligence levels and reading performance scores. Lastly, implications for English language teaching and suggestions for further research studies were provided in this study. Keywords: Emotional Intelligence, reading comprehension performance, ELT students, gender differences.