Emotional intelligence (EI), the ability to manage emotions, empathize, and regulate one's behavior, is essential for every member of society nowadays. Various social institutions, including these at the educational institutions, influence its development. The paper examines the relationship between solving communicative tasks and developing students' emotional intelligence and describes the features of students' native language training. Here, we are providing examples of analytical, associative, and research communicative tasks. The tasks involve communicative activities, emotional and sensory perception of the text, and the involvement of analytical and creative abilities. A pedagogical experiment was conducted to confirm the development of EI in the process of solving communicative tasks. Hall's methodology determined the level of EI formation. The total number of respondents was 156 (control group – 77 people, experimental group – 79 people). Three control surveys were conducted in March (at the beginning of the experiment), June (in the middle of the experiment), and December (at the end of the experiment) of 2022 to track changes in the development of EI. The empirical results were subjected to statistical analysis. Pearson's criterion confirmed the normality of the distributions, and Student's criterion showed the statistical significance of changes at the end of the experiment for all indicators and for the indicators "emotional awareness," "managing one's emotions," and "empathy" in the middle of the experiment. The study confirmed a new method of developing EI - the use of  
communicative tasks in teaching the native language, which extends the existing research results on the development of EI in learning foreign languages. The study lays grounds for several conclusions, including that solving communicative tasks may model "life situations" and indirectly form models of the future behavior of young people. It also identifies an urgent need for special courses for teachers on developing skills to create communicative tasks; it is essential to modernize teacher training programs, which should include the development of skills to model situational emotionally colored tasks that do not have an unambiguous answer and require analysis, comparisons, and evaluations.