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Purpose of study: This is a pragmatic study dealing with the speech act of disagreement at the production level. The aim of the study is to investigate whether gender (the independent variable) affects the production of disagreement strategies (dependent variables) used by Iraqi EFL learners. The study is meant to help educators through diagnosing the learners’ pragmatic abilities which were reported by Iraqi scholars as weak and underdeveloped. The study also intends to enrich the speech act literature which lacks gender consideration in the Iraqi context. Methodology: The study is limited to the analysis of the pragmatic strategies of disagreement within the theory of speech act in relation to gender. The study adopts a descriptive quantitative approach usinga written discourse completion task (WDCT) as a tool for collecting data. The tool consists of 10 open-ended situations to elicit data from80fourth-yearIraqi English as a foreign language (EFL) learners who equally were split into 40 males and 40 females. The study utilized MS Excel 2016 for statistical analysis of directness strategies with their dependent explicitness strategies. Results: It is revealedthat both males and females employ the similar amount of explicit disagreement strategies but as far as the indirect strategies are concerned,females significantly use more indirect disagreement strategies than their male counterparts. Novelty/Originality: The current studyis gender-based deals with the speech act of disagreement at the directness and explicitness levels at the Iraqi EFL learners context. Itreveals the leaners’ current state of affair in terms of their pragmatic ability inthe production of disagreements. It acts as a call for educators and syllabus designers to consider the teachability of the indirectaspect inherent in the act under study.

While much has been written on the concept and development of learner autonomy, limited studies have investigated the perceptions and classroom practices of teachers in fostering learner autonomy. This paper sets out to examine what teachers think about learner autonomy as well as the strategies they use to develop autonomous learners in a university setting using a qualitative approach. Five English teachers were selected using purposive sampling and a semi-structured interview was conducted with each of them to obtain in-depth data on their perceptions and teaching practices revolving around autonomous learning. The findings revealed that although university teachers possessed a fair understanding of what learner autonomy involves, there was a lack of focus in terms of developing learner autonomy in the classroom due to a number of challenges such as lack of teacher readiness, passive student attitude as well as the relevance and timing of English courses within the university curriculum.Keywords: Learner autonomy, Teacher perception, Teaching practices, English classrooms

There is an enormous literature in the Malaysian schools' context that reveals writing skills deficiency in English among the students. Hence, this study conducted a comparative analysis of the two popular writing approaches (product approach and process approach) practised widely as writing instructions in the educational settings. A case study was conducted on the selected teachers to study their writing instructions in ESL classrooms. The investigation revealed that language teachers largely practice product writing approach. In addition, the paper also provides some insights that as compared to product writing approach, process writing approach is more effective. Process approach provides students more opportunities for independent writing, creative writing and evaluative writing which lead towards developing higher order thinking skills. Hence, this paper recommends that Malaysian schools should adopt strategies of process writing approach to teach English in ESL classrooms to produce students who can write more competently in future.Keywords: writing instructions, Malaysian ESL classrooms, product versus process approach, comparative analysis Recommendations:The study would like to suggest several recommendations to make writing lessons for appealing and meaningful:  Include free writing of product approach in writing lessons  Inculcate drafting habits among students and involve several drafts before submitting the final draft.  Involve students in the editing processes and redraft according to the corrections suggested  Include more in-class writing activities rather than teachers' input 7.0 Sponsoring information -Acknowledgement: The funding for this publication was provided by UTHM TIER 1 Grant (H193)

This is a pilot study on analyzing the effect of gender on the speech act of suggestion. It introduces preliminary analyses of whether gender affects the use of suggestion strategies produced and recognized by Iraqi EFL learners. The strategies are dealt with from three perspectives: structural, directness, and politeness. The purpose of this small-scale study is twofold, (1) to explore if there is a relationship between gender and suggestions and (2) to check the validity and reliability and thus the workability of the instruments in question to a large-scale study. To this end, the study sampled voluntarily, on an equal base, 10 male and 10 female fourth-year undergraduates using a name-in-box method. The study used two quantitative-based instruments to elicit suggestions: Written Discourse Completion Task (WDCT) and Multiple-choice Discourse Completion Task (MDCT). Each of which consisted of 12 situations approximating real-like interactions. The corpus was statistically analyzed via SPSS and yielded that gender affected the use of structural and directness strategies of suggestions, but it had no effect on the politeness strategies. Results along with the feedback of the raters, who were chosen to rate the situations, have both proven that the instruments in question are valid and reliable to work on relevant further studies.