The present study has aimed at investigating the relationship between emotional intelligence, gender, and the receptive/productive vocabulary knowledge of Iranian EFL learners. Meanwhile, an effort is made to explore the nature of the learners' vocabulary knowledge size, considering their passive and active knowledge of the L2 words as a whole and at different word frequency word levels. The data mainly comes from three tests, an Emotional Intelligence questionnaire, the vocabulary Levels Test (Schmitt, et.al, 2001), and the Productive version of Vocabulary Levels Test (Nation and Laufer, 1995) that have been administered to a group of 59 Iranian undergraduate students majoring in English translation and literature at Qom University among which 39 are male and 20 female participants. The results revealed that female participants enjoyed from higher degrees of emotional intelligence than their male counterparts. While the difference between male and female participants regarding passive and active word knowledge was not considerably significant. The findings also reported that the size of passive word knowledge size was greater than active vocabulary knowledge size and the gap between the two types of lexical knowledge increased at lower frequency levels. The analysis manifested that there exist a moderate correlation between Emotional Intelligence and passive and active vocabulary knowledge size.
