حبیب سلیمانی

The present study was carried out to investigate the relationship between Iranian EFL learners’ multiple intelligences and their performance on four essay types. Moreover, the study sought to find out the intelligence type that could best predict the writing performance of the participants on each of the essay types. Two classes comprising a total number of 90 female and male TEFL students at Kurdistan University were selected as the original participants of the current study. They were required to take a TOEFL exam which was used to select 60 homogeneous students. Then, the Multiple Intelligence Questionnaire was administered by the researcher. Following that, the students were asked to write four types of essays, one in each separate session. The writings were collected and scored by 3 raters who used a scoring scheme developed by Wang and Liao (2008). The results of data analysis revealed that there was a significant and positive correlation between total multiple intelligences and descriptive as well as persuasive essay writing performance. Moreover, the findings indicated that verbal intelligence scores could more strongly predict the descriptive essay scores of the participants. Verbal intelligence was also the best predictor of the persuasive essay scores as well as the narrative essay scores. However, based on the results, logical intelligence was found to be the best predictor of the interpretative essay scores.