The effect of emotional inteligence levels of those learning Turkish as a foreign language on the attitudes to writing

Emotional Intelligence is a concept that is becoming increasingly important and needs to be emphasized. There are two basic constructs that bring together the emotional intelligence component: emotions and intelligence. When emotional ties are broken in the brain of an individual, it is seen that he cannot even make simple decisions. From this point of view, it can be seen that individuals' ability to express themselves, fulfill their own responsibilities, direct their own decisions, be aware of their responsibilities towards others and emotional intelligence are important. The ability to write in a foreign language is extremely important for individuals to demonstrate their current target language proficiency. Therefore, in order to achieve positive results in foreign language writing skills, it is necessary to change the attitude towards writing skills. The emotions and behaviors that form the individual's attitudes are explained by the concept of emotional intelligence. The aim of this study was to determine the effect of emotional intelligence levels of students learning Turkish as a foreign language on their writing attitudes. With these features, the research is a relational screening model study. The research universe consists of students at B1, B2 and C1 language levels who are learning Turkish as a foreign language and studying at TÖMER in state universities in the 2023-2024 academic year. Before starting the application, the Personal Information Form developed by the researcher was used and then data were collected with two different tools to check the maintenance and generalization of the effect of emotional intelligence levels of students learning Turkish as a foreign language on writing attitude. "Short Form of Emotional Intelligence Scale" was used to determine the emotional intelligence levels of the students and "Writing Skills Attitude Scale" was used to determine their writing attitudes. Data analysis was done with SPSS 27.0 program. For statistical analysis of the data, first the kurtosis and skewness values were examined, then independent t-test, single factor Anova test were used and Pearson Correlation values were examined to determine whether the data showed a significant difference with demographic variables. As a result of the study, a moderately strong significant positive relationship was determined between the emotional intelligence levels of those learning Turkish as a foreign language and their writing attitudes. In the context of gender, language level and continent variables that form the basis of the sub-problems of the research, a significant difference was observed in the effect of emotional intelligence on writing attitude in the gender variable, while no significant difference was found in the continent variable. The research found that language levels did not create a significant difference on emotional intelligence, but they did create a significant difference on writing attitude.