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In recent years the notion of teachers' professional development has featured regularly in the field of second language teaching and received great attention as a result of concerns for teacher education, particularly factors affecting teacher's principled pragmatism in the postmethod era. One such factor functioning as the focus of this study is teacher efficacy. Using Dellinger, Bobbett, Olivier, and Ellett's (2008) Teachers’ Efficacy Beliefs System-Self Form (TEBS-Self) (consisting of the six sub-scales of communication/clarification, management/climate, accommodating individual differences, motivation of students, managing learning routines, and higher order thinking skills), this study investigated the relationship between EFL teachers' expectation of their efficacy and the three teacher variables of gender, years of experience in EFL teaching, and relatedness of their education to ELT. As many as 59 EFL teachers were administered the TEBS-Self. Results showed that the three selected teacher characteristics did not affect teachers' evaluation of their efficacy. The findings imply that teachers need reflective teaching practice to develop a good understanding of their efficacy.

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Most of the studies in Interlanguage Pragmatics have focused on the performance and acquisition of speech acts by nonnative speakers, considering politeness only as a subsidiary issue. The present study pertains to linguistic politeness and attempts to investigate the effects of different teaching methods on the acquisition of English politeness strategies (PSs). Eight groups of freshman and junior English majors were randomly assigned to three experimental groups (enhanced input, explicit teaching, and role play) and one control group (mere exposure). The participants took a TOEFL test, a pretest, and finally a posttest after a seven-week treatment of a list of PSs. The results indicated that instruction has a significant positive influence on the acquisition of PSs and explicit teaching is significantly the most effective method. Role play and input enhancement were the second and third most effective. Moreover, it was shown that although the level of language proficiency significantly influenced the knowledge of PSs (the ability to recognize appropriate PSs for each social context), it did not affect the acquisition of PSs. The findings imply that the instruction of PSs can be started at intermediate level and explicit teaching alongside role play activities will greatly benefit language learners.

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The present study adopted a mixed-methods research design and explored the role of a set of cognitive (i.e., aptitude and working memory) and motivational (i.e., self-regulatory capacity and self-efficacy beliefs) individual difference variables in the writing quality and composing behavior of 78 Iranian undergraduate EFL learners. The necessary data were collected through a series of instruments and both quantitative (e.g., multiple regression and t-tests) and qualitative (e.g., narrative construction and qualitative comparative analysis) techniques were used to analyze the data. The results of these analyses indicated that the construct of foreign language aptitude had the highest level of correlation and contributory potential to account for the writing competence of the learners. The composing process of learners with different individual characteristics was also compared and it was found that learners with high self-regulation capacity orchestrated and managed their composing behavior in more effective ways compared to their less self-regulated counterparts. Moreover, the narratives and qualitative comparative analysis provided some insights about how various individual characteristics might affect the composing behavior of the individual learners. Finally, it was suggested that consideration of individual differences in writing can reveal more subtle information about the causes of strengths and weaknesses of different learners and may enable the teachers to design and implement more effective instructions targeting their learners’ individual needs

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