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The review of the literature indicates EFL teachers’ sense of efficacy has been influenced by cognitive and affective factors. Socio-economic factors may also influence EFL teachers’ sense of efficacy directly and their teaching effectiveness indirectly. One of the socioeconomic variables is the quality of work life (QWL). This study was an attempt to investigate the relationship between EFL teachers’ quality of work life and their teaching efficacy.  Ninety High school English teachers from Sistan and Baluchestan were selected. The data of the study were collected through two adapted instruments and analyzed through Pearson correlation and linear regression analysis. The results of the study showed that Iranian EFL teachers perceived themselves as having a good level of teaching efficacy. The results also showed that there was a significant correlation between all dimensions of QWL and teachers’ teaching efficacy except for “adequate and fair compensation” is significant at a P value of 0.05, but only one dimension of QWL could predict teachers’ teaching efficacy. Therefore, it could be strongly argued that teachers’ QWL is not the only influential factor in teaching efficacy.

Thematic progression pattern as the method of development of the text ensures that the reader follows the right path in understanding the text; in this regard, this subject is attracting considerable interest among discourse analysts. This paper calls into question the status of thematic progression in the process of translating English news into Persian. With this in mind, we analyzed the thematic progression patterns of a total of 643 T-units of English news along with their Persian translated version employing Daneš and McCabe progression patterns. The results of the Chi-square analysis revealed there was not a significant difference between the progression patterns in English and Persian except for the simple linear pattern. Nevertheless, there were some structural changes resulting in the alterations in progression patterns: Adding the theme that pushes the theme to the rheme, changing the postpositioned declaratives, omitting expletives, dislocating the theme in the T-unit and others. In spite of having linguistically motivated and unmotivated alterations, we also found that Persian translation seems to retain the progression pattern of the English news texts.

The study analyzed a corpus of 40 emails of requests composed by Vietnamese students to their university lecturers. The study purpose was to identify politeness strategies composed by Vietnamese students using Brown and Levinson’s model and Blum-Kulka, House and Kasper’s framework as guidelines. To obtain the results, a discourse analysis was implemented. The AnConc software was used as a research tool for the study. 40 emails from 80 students were collected and divided into three types of requestive emails: assistance, confirmation and consideration, and recommendation for data analysis. Syntactical and lexical modifiers were examined and politeness markers were identified manually by the assistance of the AnConc software. The results indicated that Vietnamese students often used status-stating, deferent and solidary politeness strategies to approach their professors for personal requests. While using these three strategies, the target students had to use syntactical and lexical devices such as modals, interrogatives, please, and hedges as speech acts or supportive moves to gain their requestive purposes. The study also identified a common pattern that Vietnamese students liked to use the email corpus in the direction of salutation, self-introduction, requests, reasons for request, and thank compliments. The study has pedagogical implications for language teachers and learners; e.g. email writing should be taught to students, especially ESP students as these students do not know the format and the appropriate language they should use in email composition. Language students should also pay attention to the correct formal form and cultural differences when composing requestive emails delivered to their professors.

This study describes the sequential pattern of “through-produced” multiple questions using Conversation Analysis that sets the agenda dimension of questions, and the academic conditions that advance its use during turns at talk from five faculty meetings. Results show that a. No first-pair of the “through-produced” questions has been answered; b. the answers to the second-pair questions are achieved through paraphrases, clarifications, keyword repetitions, and circuitous rephrasing until the hearer conforms with the agenda set; c. The subordinates frame their default identities with lower epistemic knowledge, and d. “Through-produced” multiple questions can be a manifestation of Chair’s power. Implications and recommendations for cross-linguistic comparisons are offered to generalize the findings beyond the specific domain of the meeting.

This study aimed to investigate the efficacy of metacognitive strategy instruction intervention on reducing language listening anxiety of Iranian EFL learners in the light of 2 listening metacognitive strategy instruction models of Integrated Experiential Learning Task (IELT) (Goh, 2010) and Metacognitive pedagogical Sequence (MPS) (Vandergrift, 2004). Participants were 63 B1 level learners who were chosen through random sampling and were randomly assigned to 2 experimental and 2 control groups. Before and after the intervention, Kim’s (2000) Foreign Language Listening Anxiety scale (FLLAS) and the listening section of Preliminary English Test (PET) were administered to all groups as pre and post tests. All four groups were taught by the same researcher and the listening comprehension material was constant over the groups. The first experimental group received IELT intervention, the second experimental group received MPS intervention, and both control groups received traditional product-based listening comprehension instruction while the active control group also received explicit instruction of the metacognitive strategies. ANCOVA results proved that although both IELT and MPS were effective in lowering anxiety level, the performance of MPS was of a large effect size, and it was a better model to lower learners’ anxiety. Both models significantly improved learners’ listening comprehension.

Conveying a strong message within a language stems from not only a linguistically appropriate utterance but also a pragmatically appropriate discourse. Broadly considering various facets of pragmatics, pragmatic assessment has not been potentially brought into perspective. To address this discourse gap, this study, guided by the principles of mixed-method design, pursued three purposes: to inspect the matches and mismatches, to explore rating variations, and to assess the rater consistency between the holistic and analytic rating methods of disagreement speech acts in L2 by non-native English teachers. As a result, 12 different pragmatic situations for disagreement DCTs accompanied by EFL learners' responses to each situation were rated by 50 non-native English teachers. Initially, they were asked to rate it holistically, incorporating both ratings and providing comments. The content analysis of raters' comments indicated sixteen disagreement criteria. The descriptive statistics also revealed variations across different situations. Moreover, the teachers were asked to rate it analytically based on the assessment rubrics adopted from Ishihara and Cohen (2010). The findings of intra-class correlations implied that respondents were more consistent in analytic rating. Moreover, the results indicated that there was a convergence between the two rating methods suggesting that the raters adopted the same level of leniency and severity in rating. Overall, the results accentuated the significance of pragmalinguistic and sociopragmatic aspects of language for EFL raters. Finally, the results of the present study place a premium on the importance of pragmatic assessment training as well as cultural awareness.

Various studies suggest that it is important to determine students' personality charecteristics and assertiveness and make them aware of these differences in order to improve learning process and outcomes. This study aimed to find out how much of the variance in postgraduate students’ assertiveness is explained by five personality characteristics (i.e., Openness, Neuroticism, Extroversion, Agreeableness, and Conscientiousness) and which one of these characteristics significantly predicts the students’ assertiveness. To this end, 66 postgraduate students within the age range of 22 to 35 participated in this descriptive correlational study. They were majoring in English language teaching at Islamic Azad University,Tabriz Branch, Tabriz, Iran. The College Self-expression Scale (CSES) and Big-Five Personality Inventory were used to assess the students’ level of assertiveness and their personality characteristics, respectively. In order to answer the research questions, a multiple linear regression analysis was carried out. The results revealed that about 14 percent of the postgraduate students’ assertiveness is explained by five personality characteristics and out of them, only Extroversion has a significant contribution to their assertiveness. The pedagogical implications are presented for teachers, students, syllabus designers, and materials writers.