Educational assessment is critically significant in all educational and academic contexts including foreign/second language learning contexts. Concerning language testing processes, studies have revealed that test performance cannot be solely based on the test takers’ communicative language ability level and different seemingly construct irrelevant factors are also involved in this respect. On this basis, the identification of the contributing factors remains of utmost significance, though despite its prime importance, only limited attention has recently been paid to this research line. With this purpose in mind, the researchers in this study selected 200 Iranian EFL learners through convenience sampling and asked them to take the Emotional Intelligence questionnaire, self-efficacy scale adapted from the Motivational Strategies for Learning Questionnaire (MSLQ), the autonomous learning scale, and a TOEFL reading comprehension sample test. To analyze the obtained data, multiple linear regression analysis was conducted to determine whether participants' reading comprehension performance could be predicted by their EI, self-efficacy, and autonomy, which revealed that the three variables are strong predictors of reading comprehension, with self-efficacy being the strongest. Moreover, structural equation modeling (SEM) was employed to investigate the structural model of interplay among the study variables and a hypothesized model, which was developed in accordance with the related literature was tested. As evidenced by the results, the relationship between emotional intelligence and reading comprehension appears to be partially mediated by autonomy and self-efficacy. The statistical analyses postulated a unique pattern of relation among the study variables which might be of significant importance for both foreign language education experts and learners who might wish to reconsider the typology of the contributing factors to the language learners’ test performance. This m
