The emotional understanding ability is one of the four branches included in the theoretical model on emotions by Mayer and Salovey (1997). There seems to be a connection between EFL learners' speaking proficiency and the emotional understanding ability. Emotional understanding can play an important part in the development of EFL learners' speaking proficiency through the use of authentic materials and meaningful communicative tasks about everyday topics.
The main reason for studying a foreign language is communication, but many students do not feel confidently enough when trying to develop their speaking skills. There is a growing body of literature on EFL students’ speaking proficiency that suggests that emotional competence should be regarded as one of the most important elements in developing this skill in a foreign language. However, most studies regarding emotional competencies in the EFL class have focused on the affective dimension as a whole, not considering other emotional competencies like emotional understanding (Hassan and Rahimi, 2014). Following Mayer and Salovey’s (1997) theoretical model on emotions, emotional understanding involves having knowledge about emotions, being able to recognize them and reason about them (Mayer, Salovey and Caruso, 2000). The problem is that adolescents, in general, lack the competence to recognize and label emotions and are unable to become aware of their emotions and those of other people (Bisquerra, 2000:147). The study aims to elucidate the connection between EFL learners’ speaking proficiency and emotional understanding. 124 EFL students in the fourth year of Secondary Education from three different high schools in Spain took part in the study. Oral data were collected through individual interviews and the Situational Test of Emotional Understanding – Brief (Allen et al., 2014), which is based on ability models, was administered to measure the students’ emotional understanding. We detected a significant positive connection between emotional understanding and all the five parameters considered to assess students’ speaking proficiency, namely Token/Type, MLU, Error-free utterances and Speech rate. The findings are an important preliminary step in considering emotional understanding to develop learners’ speaking proficiency and are consistent with studies that highlight the importance of providing students with meaningful communicative tasks about everyday topics, despite the lack of exposure to authentic situations in the EFL class (Zhang, 2009).
