Applied and Ecolinguistic Dimensions of Emotional Competence in Foreign Language Communication

Abstract

The relevance of the present study arises from the fact that foreign language communication increasingly takes place in intercultural, digital, and educational environments in which linguistic correctness alone does not guarantee communicative success. Under such conditions, emotional regulation, the ability to sustain interpersonal contact, and the capacity to maintain a safe and constructive tone of interaction become especially important. The aim of this article is to identify the ecolinguistic and applied dimensions of emotional competence in foreign language communication, while the object of the study is foreign language discourse in written, oral, digital, and lingua franca formats. The study was conducted as a qualitative-quantitative corpus-interpretive analysis based on open corpus resources, emotion-lexical tools, and survey data, with descriptive statistics and coding across five analytical categories. The findings show that emotional competence is most frequently manifested through hesitation markers, self-correction, clarification, reformulation, mitigation, supportive responses, and repair moves. The results further indicate that linguistic uncertainty and hesitation do not necessarily lead to communicative failure when they are accompanied by appropriate regulatory actions. An applied ecolinguistic model is proposed that encompasses emotional awareness, emotional regulation, communicative adaptation, ecological interaction, and communicative outcome. The practical significance of the findings lies in the possibility of using this model for the analysis of foreign language discourse, the development of educational tasks, and the design of digital language feedback. A promising direction for future research is to test the proposed model in authentic educational, online, professional, and intercultural communicative situations. The findings may also be useful for improving foreign language education and communication training in increasingly digitalized learning environments.