This study explored whether the language institutes where members of a specific community learn English brings about any changes in the structure as well as the relationships found between the factors underlying the Cultural Intelligence Scale (CQS) developed by Ang et al. (2007). To this end, the Persian CQS translated and validated by Khodadady and Ghahari (2011) was administered to 381 Iranians who learned English at advanced levels in several private and semi-private language institutes in Mashhad, Iran. The application of Principal Axis Factoring to the data and rotating the extracted factors via Varimax with Kaiser Normalization showed that the same four factors underlying Iranian university students’ cultural intelligence (CQ), underlie English learners’ CQ as well, i.e., Cognitive, Motivational, Behavioral and Metacognitive. One of the items comprising the Metacognitive dimension of the latter group did not, however, load acceptably on the factor while three items comprising the Behavioral factor cross loaded on the Cognitive factor revealing a lower significant relationship between the two. Unlike a significant and positive relationship found between the Cognitive and Motivational dimensions of university students’ CQ, learning English results in establishing a negative relationship between the two dimensions. The results are discussed and suggestions are made for future research.

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