Abstract-Interest in expertise studies has been shown from the beginning of 21st century so far in quite many fields including art, music, chess, medical sciences, etc. Just recently, applied linguistics has joint this new wave of research and this was an inspiration for conducting the present research. Since the early twenty-first century, expertise studies have been undertaken in a large number of domains. Applied linguistics is relatively a newcomer to the list which makes any study aiming to cast light on some aspect of expertise in this domain worth considering. In the present study, a model is proposed for the construct of teaching expertise in ELT comprised of 8 interrelated factors. Based on a perusal of previous research on expertise in education and the thought patterns and behavior of exemplary teachers of English language these factors were extracted. The direct or indirect effect of each factor on the latent variable, teaching expertise, is indicated in the model. For further content validation, 20 specialists of the field were interviewed. These specialists included university professors of applied linguistics, teacher educators, teacher trainers at the private sector, mentor teachers and experienced teachers. The 8 factors which were extracted from prior research and interviewees' remarks include: teacher's language proficiency, pedagogical content knowledge, social recognition, cognitive skills, experience, professional development, contextual knowledge, and learner-centered teaching. These are perceived to be the key constituents of teaching expertise in ELT. This model is aimed to be later used as a basis for developing an instrument for operationalizing the construct of teacher expertise in ELT.

The teachers need to be conceived as a "change agent" and not as a mere transmitter of knowledge and culture. In developing countries like Iran, one of the most significant concerns in the field of teachers' education is efficiency of pre-service programs. To this aim, the current descriptive-evaluative study intended to describe the state of pre-service teachers' assessment in the field of language testing by (a) examining the exam questions to find out whether they are aligned with curriculum objectives and syllabus (content validity, (b) exploring whether they take care of higher order cognitive processes and (c) finding what combinations of cognitive process levels and knowledge types in Revised Bloom's Taxonomy are prevalent in the questions. The results exhibited an unbalanced coverage of content in exams. Also the questions were found to be inadequate in terms of measuring complex cognitive skills (Analyze and Evaluate); Remember and Understand domains take up 91.6 % of all questions and no item was found for Create. Three combinations of cognitive process level and knowledge type was dominant in the data set: (1) Remember Factual Knowledge, (2) Understand Conceptual Knowledge, and (3) Apply Procedural Knowledge. These associations confirm the Anderson and Krathwohl's (2001) proposition.

Attention to silence as part of the communicative discourse was first drawn in Sack's (1974) paper, in which it was perceived as a linguistic and communicative form, and from the functional point of view as capable of expressing ideational, interpersonal, and textual functions. Awareness of multiple functions of silence including the referential, emotive, conative, phatic, poetic and metalanguage is of greater significance when it comes to language learning settings, where learners from a different cultural background from the target language are present to learn that language. In such contexts, awareness of various functions of silence and correct interpretation of it is essential in teacher-student rapport. This paper aims to, first, provide an introduction to the multiple functions of silence in general and then to investigate these functions in EFL classes of Iran's private language institutes. The researchers' own teaching experience along with class observations and 2 phases of interview with teachers of those classes comprise the research data. Findings were indicative of teachers' lack of awareness of diverse communicative functions of silence in class and that this awareness could be raised through the informal interview phases. This paper attests to the fact that not all learner's silence should be interpreted negatively as lack of attention or knowledge. Teachers need to be aware of the salient meanings of silence in their EFL class and take an appropriate reactive step accordingly.

An important dimension that characterizes the contextual differences in second language acquisition (SLA) is the degree to which instruction is implicit or explicit. However, whether these differences in context play a role in determining the neural activity to process L2 grammar has not been well characterized. The present study investigated this issue by comparing the neural regions activated in response to novel L2 syntactic rules acquired under conditions of implicit and explicit instruction. In addition, participants’ declarative and procedural memories were measured to better understand the mediating effect of memory during learning under different conditions. Explicitly and implicitly instructed learners showed statistically indistinguishable behavioral performance. Region of interest (ROI) analysis also revealed that the task activated both declarative and procedural memory structures suggesting that instructional context did not affect the recruitment of memory systems when processing L2 syntax.