The relevance of research devoted to the problem of emotional intelligence of students is growing every year. Scientists agree that emotional intelligence should be understood as the ability to effectively understand the emotional sphere of human life in general: to understand emotions and the emotional background of relationships, to use your emotions to solve problems related to relationships and motivation, as well as the ability to manage your own emotions. Self-control, persistence, and the ability to motivate one’s actions – all of this can and should be taught, thereby giving them the opportunity to best use their genetically predetermined mental potential. Moreover, the ability to manage one’s emotional sphere has a beneficial effect on mental and somatic health.

Emotions are processes that reflect personal significance and assessment of external and internal situations for human life in the form of experiences. Emotions play a major role in teaching a foreign language. Scientists emphasize the importance of activating the emotional memory of students, which can be optimally realized by influencing the emotional sphere of students, which helps to increase motivation for studying the discipline, as a result of which learning outcomes improve.

The definition of «intelligence» also has different interpretations. Researchers in this area consider intelligence as a person’s ability to use mental operations. Also, general intelligence is understood as a system of mental mechanisms that assist in building an objective picture of the world «inside» a person. Intelligence plays a significant role in human communicative behavior.

In modern science, there are different definitions of the concept of «emotional intelligence». Firstly, emotional intelligence is a certain ability to both understand emotions and perform actions in accordance with them. Secondly, emotional intelligence is identified with a person’s ability to understand and analyze the emotional state of communicants in order to select adequate speech actions that will ensure an optimal result. Thirdly, emotional intelligence is understood as a person’s ability to achieve the intended communication goals using their rational and emotional capabilities. In relation to the learning process, emotional intelligence is considered as a complex that includes a person’s mental development and the mechanisms of the psyche that regulate the mental operations through which adequate communication is realized [1].

American researcher Daniel Goleman introduced a classification of emotional intelligence, according to which it is divided into two components: interpersonal intelligence and intrapersonal intelligence. The first is characterized by the following characteristics: understanding the emotions of other people at the level of intuition without verbalizing them, understanding the emotion of another person through expression, i.e., through external manifestations of emotions, the ability to manage the emotions of others – manifested in the ability to evoke the «right» emotions in people and control unwanted ones. People with a high level of intrapersonal intelligence are characterized by: awareness of their own emotions and feelings, their correct identification, understanding the factors that cause these emotions and the ability of the individual to verbally describe them; the ability to control expression – the individual’s qualitative ability to control the manifestation of their emotions and feelings [2].

Teaching a foreign language has a significant impact on the formation of a student’s personality, since it is an integrative subject and includes a whole range of human interests: literature, art, politics, sports, travel, and professional activity. The development of emotional intelligence in students largely depends on the teacher’s activities, starting with class planning and ending with the nature of relationships in the group both between students and between the teacher and students. Therefore, a methodically correctly structured foreign language class is especially important for developing the possibility of developing emotional intelligence in students, successfully using, for example, communicative situations as learning tasks. It is the communicatively oriented tasks that have a number of advantages: they develop students’ social and emotional intelligence, facilitate work on difficult, information-rich text, develop respect for their own and others’ thoughts and experience, sharpen curiosity and initiative, develop active listening and increase students’ self-esteem [3].

In the process of learning foreign languages, not only mental activity is important, but also social skills, thanks to which a person would follow not only the algorithm of rules, but would also be able to intuitively create adequate speech fragments, adapt to the tone and manner of the subject of linguistic interaction [4].

The role of emotional intelligence in the speech activity of students when studying a foreign language is very important. It is considered depending on speech forms.

Since oral speech is an information exchange, clothed in a sign-symbolic form, aimed at establishing and maintaining contact, achieving mutual understanding with the corresponding communicative influence on the recipient, then the goal of teaching speaking should be the formation of foreign language speech competencies. However, this is not the only function: it is necessary to highlight the informational, regulatory, emotional-evaluative and etiquette functions. Texts are considered not only in terms of content, but also the emotional coloring of its content. The emotional coloring of the text for oral speech can be manifested in the structure of remarks, intonation designations, lexical and grammatical forms. For example, dialogic speech differs from monologue by its inherent brevity, reciprocity, clichés, ellipsoidal form, the appearance of interjections, etc., which express one or another emotion in addition to the simple transfer of information. It has been established that any statement of the speaker should be assessed not only as an exclusively informational message, but also an emotional one. The emotional goal of the statement is to mobilize the listener to activity, the manifestation of emotion, feeling, the transmission of values ​​and subjective assessment; and monologue speech as a subjective product is rooted in the personal experiences, value-moral guidelines of the speaker. Thus, the emotional content of oral foreign language speech performs a number of specific functions in the formation of foreign language competencies, which must be taken into account.

The next category of competencies is related to listening skills: perception, decoding and assimilation of information transmitted by the addresser to the recipient or a group of people. The success of this process is based on the features of short-term and long-term memory and mastery of language material, the ability to recognize speech patterns. The affective impact of an oral text, based on literary stylistic devices, leads to an easier understanding of the content of speech and the emotional disposition of the author, which opens up additional meaning for its awareness. The formation of this competence contributes to a more accurate perception of the message coming from the communicant, the empathy of the recipient. The goal of teaching reading in a foreign language is to form a competence that allows you to understand, edit and comment on foreign-language texts of varying degrees of complexity (journalistic, fiction, technical, scientific, etc.). The process of reading can be characterized as a procedure of perception, processing and awareness of the information flow, designed as a graphic code under the rules of the language. The modern paradigm uses samples taken from authentic texts in the relevant language, with which students are taught to work. Along with the primary goal – to teach how to work with a foreign-language text – there is also an auxiliary one aimed at perceiving and assimilating the emotional context of the text. This approach makes it possible to bring the student closer to the mentality of the ethnic group that is the native speaker of the language being studied. Targeted study of the emotional content of the text has a positive effect on the formation of general language and speech competencies of students. There is a tendency to teach foreign-language reading on the basis of fiction texts, while journalistic, scientific, technical and similar genres in complexity are inferior, appearing only when performing highly specialized tasks (teaching a language in a specific area). This is due to the assumed high level of culture and emotional saturation of fiction texts. But the formation of competencies in working with texts of increased complexity of practical significance is necessary, as it allows developing ideas about emotions when achieving success in overcoming difficulties. There is a tendency to introduce everyday texts, the stylization of which is characterized by colloquialism, expressiveness, etc., found in social networks, personal messages in messengers and similar communication channels. The integration of such types of texts in teaching a foreign language is situationally appropriate, since this actually corresponds to the achievement of the ultimate goal of forming basic speech and language competencies – communication with a native speaker of a foreign language and culture and forms ideas about the emotional behavior of another.

By means of written speech training, the skills of structured presentation of one’s own thoughts and conclusions are formed and consolidated, presented not only in the form of an evidentiary-factual base, but also emotional-stylistic content. A number of characteristic differences between a written text and an oral one can be distinguished: structural, thematic and semantic integrity. The emotional component of writing texts is relevant to the problem posed in the work, personal experience and interests of students. Therefore, teachers give preference to problems that coincide with these parameters. The evidentiary base of arguments is built either from the personal experience of the author, or from literary and other text works similar in theme. Expressiveness in the form of literary stylistic devices is assessed positively [5].

Emotional intelligence helps to recognize the emotional context, motives, intentions, needs of the interlocutor and one’s own experiences, which determines the advantages for the student. When teaching a foreign language, the emotional component contained in all types of speech activity allows developing the cognitive skills of students necessary for the implementation of speech activity, which increases the effectiveness of the teaching process as a whole.