A voyage of discovering the impacts of teacher immunity and emotion regulation on professional identity, autonomy, and work motivation in Iranian EFL landscape.

The literature has widely recognized the significance of examining the influence of teacher professional identity (TPI), teacher autonomy (TA), and teacher work motivation (TWM) on teacher well-being. However, there is a noticeable gap in the research regarding the role of teacher immunity (TI) and teacher emotion regulation (TER) in TPI, TA, TWM among English as a foreign language (EFL) teachers. In light of this gap, the present study aimed to investigate the association between TI and TER with TPI, TA, and TWM of EFL teachers. A sample of 433 EFL teachers completed the Language Teacher Immunity Instrument, the Language Teacher Emotion Regulation Inventory, the Teacher Professional Identity Scale, the Teacher Autonomy Questionnaire, and the Multidimensional Work Motivation Scale. The Confirmatory Factor Analysis and Structural Equation Modeling were conducted to analyze the data. Findings disclosed that TI and TER were strong predictor of TPI, TA, and TWM among the EFL teachers. The study concludes by offering some pedagogical implications for different stakeholders and discussing potential areas of research that can be developed based on the findings.

Modeling the contributions of EFL university professors' emotion regulation to self-efficacy, work engagement, and anger.

As university professors' emotion regulation (ER) plays a pivotal role in their efficacy, it is essential to explore if it is significantly correlated with work engagement (WE), self-efficacy, and anger at the workplace. To respond to the call, this research inspected the contributions of university professors' ER to their WE, self-efficacy, and anger. For this purpose, a total of 278 university professors were selected using a convenience sampling method and asked to fill out Language Teacher Emotion Regulation Inventory, Engaged Teacher Scale, Teacher Sense of Efficacy Scale, and Teacher Anger Scale. A structural equation modeling was used to analyze the gathered data. Results disclosed that the participants' ER significantly contributed to their WE and self-efficacy. Additionally, the findings documented that the participants' ER was negatively correlated with their anger. The implications of the findings are discussed for pertinent stakeholders.

Exploring the effects of online learning on EFL learners' motivation, anxiety, and attitudes during the COVID-19 pandemic: a focus on Iran.

With the emergence and dissemination of the COVID-19 pandemic and the transformation of education to online classes, it is important to explore the effects of online learning on EFL learners' psychological factors in the Iranian EFL learners. Hence, this study aims to explore the effects of online learning on EFL learners' motivation, anxiety, and attitude. For this purpose, using a convenience sampling method, a total of 293 upper-intermediate EFL learners at Iran Language Institute in Ahvaz, Iran, took the Oxford Quick Placement Test, and 200 EFL learners whose scores fell around the mean were selected and assigned randomly to an experimental group and a control group. The participants' motivation, anxiety, and attitudes were measured before and after the treatments (lasting 10 one-hour sessions held once a week) using validated questionnaires. The collected data were analyzed through a one-way MANOVA test and a one-sample t-test. The findings evidenced that online learning positively affected the participants' motivation, anxiety, and attitudes. That is, due to the online learning, their motivation increased, their anxiety lowered, and positive attitudes were shaped toward L2 learning. Finally, based on the findings, some implications are proposed.

Potential of podcasting and blogging in cultivating Iranian advanced EFL learners' reading comprehension.

This study explores the potential of podcasting and blogging in cultivating advanced EFL learners' reading comprehension (RC) gains, as well as their perceptions of their effectiveness in improving their RC gains. For this purpose, three intact female classes (n = 20) were selected using a convenience sampling method from Pooyesh Language Center in Borujerd City, Iran. Then, they were randomly assigned into three groups, including the podcasting group, blogging group, and control group. Afterward, they went through a pre-test, an intervention (12 one-hour sessions held twice a week), and a post-test. For disclosing their perceptions, 10 students of the experimental groups were requested to fill out a reflective written statement about the potential of podcasting and blogging in improving their RC gains. A one-way ANOVA and a thematic coding analysis were used to analyze the collected data. Findings revealed that the podcasting and blogging groups outweighed the control group at the end of the treatments. Additionally, the results evidenced that there was no statistically significant difference between the podcasting and blogging groups. The qualitative findings disclosed that the participants had positive perceptions toward using podcasting and blogging in developing RC. Finally, the implications for L2 teachers and L2 learners are discussed.

Identifying the Leadership Challenges of K-12 Public Schools During COVID-19 Disruption: A Systematic Literature Review.

Globally, the COVID-19 pandemic is triggering a public health emergency and crisis on a large scale, with far-reaching effects and severe damage to all aspects of politics, economy, cultural and social life, and health. Consecutive outbreaks over the past nearly 2 years of "living with COVID-19" have forced most schools to physically close, resulting in the largest educational disruption in human history. In turbulent times of the COVID-19 crisis, school leaders are facing numerous major challenges germane to school governance and leadership. The key objective of the study is to fully explore the prospective challenges principals are encountering in public schools in times of COVID-19. To fulfill the research purpose, a systematic literature review (SLR) was carried out to investigate the leadership challenges. As a result, a total of 24 challenges were explored through SLR approach. Frequency analysis approach was initially applied to figure out the most significant challenges. Accordingly, seven challenges were found statistically significant as showing frequency ≥ 50 each. Irrevocably, the study works as a contribution to K-12 school leadership by providing guidance for current and future leaders in crisis based on practical investigation, experiences, and recommendations. Policy makers can leverage these findings to make necessary adjustments to school policy to better prepare school leaders for crisis. Additionally, the findings of the current study are believed to have profound implications for future research. These findings expand our current understanding on school leadership in time of crisis that needs further investigation. Subsequent studies can quantitatively and/or qualitatively validate these leadership challenges findings regarding a particular school context.

The Mediating Role of Critical Thinking Abilities in the Relationship Between English as a Foreign Language Learners' Writing Performance and Their Language Learning Strategies.

Recent developments in the field of education have led to a renewed interest in the mediating role of critical thinking abilities (CTA) in the relationship between language learning strategies and the intermediate English as a Foreign Language (EFL) learners' writing performance. Oxford Placement Test (OPT) was run to homogenize the participants, and 100 intermediate learners out of 235 were selected. Then, two valid questionnaires of Ricketts' Critical Thinking Disposition and Oxford's Strategy Inventory for Language Learning were administered. Having administered the questionnaires, the researchers asked the participants to sit for a writing test. The data collected from the questionnaires and as well as the scores of their writing performances were analyzed through SPSS (25.00). The results showed a significant relationship between (a) learning strategies and learners' writing performances, (b) the sub-sets of learning strategies and learners' writing performances, and (c) CTA and learners' learning strategies. However, CTA did not play a mediating role in the relationship between intermediate EFL learners' learning strategies and writing performance. Based on the results of the study, one might also conclude that strategies seemed to play a more important role in the performance of learners especially their writing performances. Therefore, this study had useful contributions for students, teachers, and curriculum designers. Findings of this research could assist teachers to be aware of learners' strategies in learning writing and help their students to be responsive to using learning strategies in their learning process and create a satisfactory learning context for using learning strategies. Therefore, learners were able to become independent and feel responsibility for their own learning. Secondly, curriculum developers could take advantage of the findings to include learning strategies training into the curriculum. As a result, students were able to use strategies in their learning process more easily and finally, the results might pave the way for improving the research findings.

Exploring EFL Learners' Metaphorical Conceptions of Language Learning: A Multimodal Analysis.

Owing to the limitations of linguistic modes to portray aptly L2 learners' metaphors of language learning experience, growing attention has been paid to taking advantage of other modes like visual ones to ameliorate this concern. Hence, the present study sought to explore images and metaphors Iranian EFL learners may have in mind about the essence of English language as a foreign learning. To this end, Iranian EFL learners' verbal and non-verbal forms of metaphorical depiction were examined. One intact class, including intermediate male and female learners (n = 11) at a non-profit language institute was selected randomly. The data were collected through both verbal (a single-item questionnaire) and non-verbal (drawings) tools. The learners' drawings and written descriptions were examined so as to both tap into their mental representations of what 'English learning' means to them and get closer insights into the learners' belief system. The study's conceptual framework was mainly built on Oxford et al.'s (System 26:3-50, 1998) perspectives on education and Vygotsky's (Mind in society: the development of higher psychological processes, Harvard University Press, 1978) Socio-cultural theory (SCT) of learning. The multimodal analysis of the metaphors evidenced that the learners' verbal and visual metaphorical representations shared the common perspectives towards English learning. Additionally, the extracted metaphorical concepts disclosed the learners' positive attitudes, enthusiasm, and desire for English learning. Results unveiled that most of the visual and verbal metaphorical depictions portray language learning as a joyful, dynamic and discovery individual process. The study ends with presenting some implications and offering some avenues for further research.

Visual-Syntactic Text Formatting: Developing EFL Learners' Reading Fluency Components.

Developing English reading fluency (ERF) is challenging due to cross-linguistic differences between L1 and L2. This study replicated, with modifications, prior study of "syntactic enhancement and secondary school EFL Students' reading fluency in South Korea." The current project investigated the impact of visual-syntactic text formatting (VSTF) on developing ERF components (i.e., parsing skills, reading speed, and comprehension) in an Iranian context. In order to reformat block-formatted English text in a way to be more concise, the VSTF technology was used. For 20 weeks, two experimental groups (76 intermediate EFL students) read reformatted passages, whereas the control group (n = 38) read their block-formatted textbook. After analyzing the pre-and post-test results, it was demonstrated that reformatted texts could support EFL students to enhance their ERF elements. The researchers also found that VSTF can be used as a syntactic enhancement, making it simpler for EFL learners to receive English syntactic information as input. Findings have led to the reasonable interpretation that learning L2 reading fluency components (RFC) was more productive when the VSTF technology was utilized for the learning processes.

Using Games to Promote English as a Foreign Language Learners' Willingness to Communicate: Potential Effects and Teachers' Attitude in Focus.

This study aims to find out the role of games in promoting students' willingness to communicate (WTC) and their teachers' attitude toward it. In order to collect the data, the researchers employed a 28-item questionnaire which was given to 60 English as a Foreign Language (EFL) learners in an English institute. Then, the students were randomly divided into two groups of 30 learners functioning as control and experimental groups. The students in the experimental group received games in their language lessons and classes, while control group learners did not. At the end of the term, the same questionnaire was given to the students to know if playing games had a significant impact on their WTC. In addition, the teachers were asked to answer a 30-item questionnaire to investigate their attitudes toward playing games in language classes. The results showed that most of the teachers in this study believe that games have a positive influence on the students' attitudes towards learning English and that using them in class serves many educational purposes. In addition, games played a significant role in improving the EFL leaners' willingness to communicate. In the light of these findings, the researchers suggested using games as energizers and practical activities at the end of class not only to improve enthusiasm for learning, but also to improve the learners' WTC.

The Comparative Effects of Teacher Versus Peer-Scaffolding on EFL Learners' Incidental Vocabulary Learning and Reading Comprehension: A Socio-Cultural Perspective.

Drawing on sociocultural theory, and multiple empirical studies conducted on the effectiveness of scaffolding on second or foreign language learning, the authors investigated the application of various forms of scaffolding (i.e., teacher versus peer-scaffolding) on EFL learners' incidental vocabulary learning and reading comprehension performance through a sociocultural perspective. To this end, 60 EFL learners out of one-hundred were selected through the administration of an Oxford Placement Test from three language institutes and divided into 3 groups (two experimental and one control group) each including 20 intermediate EFL learners. The first experimental group received teacher-scaffolding instruction, the second experimental group received peer-scaffolding instruction and the control group received traditional instruction with no scaffolding. The vocabulary and reading comprehension pre-tests were administered to the three groups. At the end of the experiment, the vocabulary and reading comprehension post-tests were administered. The descriptive statistics (mean and standard deviation) and the inferential statistics (a One-way ANOVA) were run to analyze the collected data. The results showed that both experimental groups had better performance than the control group and there was a significant difference between teacher-scaffolding and peer-scaffolding in both vocabulary knowledge and reading comprehension performance and the peer-scaffolding group had a better performance than the teacher-scaffolding group. This research provided some implications about different types of scaffolding for language teachers and syllabus designers.

The Effect of Teaching Formulaic Expressions Through Contrastive Lexical Approach on Iranian Pre-intermediate EFL Learners' Writing Skill.

This study aimed to investigate the effect of the contrastive lexical approach on Iranian EFL learners' writing skills. For this study, forty pre-intermediate students from a private English language institutes in Ahvaz, Iran were selected. Then, they were randomly divided into two equal groups of 20; one experimental and one control group. To have two groups of equal numbers, we used a block randomization sampling method. All of these students were female, ranging in age from 18 to 30. Their level of English language proficiency had already been determined by the Institute to be pre-intermediate. First, they were given a pre-test to determine their writing ability. Afterward, the experimental group received writing practices through the Contrastive Lexical Approach (CLA), during 14 sessions. Each session lasted for an hour and a half. The teacher sensitized learners in the experimental group towards the presence of L2 equivalents for L1 formulaic expressions, while the control group received an ordinary, traditional instruction, during which learners read texts containing the same formulaic expressions as for the experimental group without receiving any translation and were then asked to write about the same topics. At the end of the course, a post-test was administered to the two groups. Data were analyzed through independent and paired samples t tests after ensuring the normality of the data. Finally, to discover the power of the statistical tests, the effect size was also calculated. The study showed that using a contrastive lexical approach has a significant positive effect on Iranian EFL learners' writing skills. As the findings in this study propose, the writing skill can be improved through the use of a contrastive lexical approach. Teaching through a contrastive lexical approach, hopefully, gives the learners the chance to fathom their skillful writing competence, which requires the proper use of varied forms of structures and expressions and this, in turn, may sensitize them to know more about what language features to work on to increase their writing proficiency.

A Contrastive Analysis of Emotional Terms in Bed-Night Stories Across Two Languages: Does it Affect Learners' Pragmatic Knowledge of Controlling Emotions? Seeking Implications to Teach English to EFL Learners.

The present investigation aimed at studying emotional terms (ETs) in Persian and English bed-night stories for children by adopting a contrastive analysis approach within two phases. Emotional terms were categorized into two theoretical models (tokens and types) in phase one of the study, and in the second phase, the effect of teaching emotive narratives on learners' pragmatic knowledge of controlling emotions was scrutinized. To this aim, 30 English bed-night stories (15 in English and 15 in Persian) with similar lengths and difficulty levels were selected randomly. In the first phase of the study, the frequency of occurrence of emotional terms (ETs) in English and Persian English bed-night stories were compared. The results indicated that there were not statistically significant differences between the two groups of stories in terms of the emotion tokens utilized in both languages. Nevertheless, there was a major disparity in the number of ETs found in English and Persian bed-night tales concerning various types of emotions. During the second phase of the study, a group of 25 EFL learners were explicitly taught emotive English bed-night tales. A pre-test post-test design using a Discourse Completion Test was used to seek the efficacy of teaching ETs on the learners' pragmatic knowledge of controlling emotions. Findings showed that teaching emotive narratives enhanced students' pragmatic knowledge of emotions significantly. In light of the findings of the study, a number of conclusions are drawn and the implications are discussed.