A Study Of The Relationship Between Junior Middle School Students’ Emotional Intelligence And Their EFL Listening Comprehension Performance

The New English Course Standard for the Basic Education Stage(2011) focuses on fostering students’ basic English ability and developing their thinking model. These two aspects are related to students’ emotional intelligence, which has much to do with their learning performance. Language learning is a complicated process that calls for learners’ attention, cognition, etc. Besides, researchers have found positive relationship between students’ emotional intelligence and their second language learning performance.This study attempts to investigate the possible relationship between EFL learners’ emotional intelligence and their listening comprehension performance. The main concern of this paper is threefold:(1) What are the present situations of junior middle school students’ emotional intelligence and their EFL listening comprehension performance?(2) What’s the influence of literature-based activities on raising EFL students’ emotional intelligence?(3) What’s the relationship between junior middle school students’ emotional intelligence and their EFL listening comprehension performance?The sample population for this study consists of 76 Grade Nine students from two classes in a junior middle school in Hangzhou. They are taught by the same teacher with the same teaching schedule. To examine the equality of these two classes, a comprehensive English test and Bar-On EQ-i: YV(SF)(Bar-On Emotional Quotient Inventory: Youth Version-Short Form) are administered prior to the experiment respectively. Then, the experimental group is given some pieces of short literature listening materials with high emotional content to motivate them to think, listen and discuss their emotions. Meanwhile, the control group is assigned contents exclusive of emotional words and taught as an ordinary English listening class in China. After eight weeks’ classroom teaching, students take a listening section of Grade Nine Mid-term English test and Bar-On EQ-i: YV(SF). Data collected from these two instruments are processed by SPSS 20.0 and Descriptive analysis, Pearson correlation product are run to address each of the main concern in this study. At last, students in both two classes are interviewed on the topic of general emotional state, their feelings to English listening learning and test, and listening comprehension materials.Results reveal that the level of students’ EI is relatively satisfactory yet still needs improvement. By comparison with other English skills, students’ performance on listening comprehension is not so good. Besides, after two months’ classroom experiments, students in the experimental group make a significantly higher improvement than those in the control group on Bar-On EQ-i: YV(SF) and listening comprehension test in the post-tests. Furthermore, there is a relatively strong positive relationship between general EI and listening comprehension performance, the most correlated one is stress management among the five components. Lastly, pedagogical implications are put forward and also limitations of this research are discussed.