Educational context is a pool of various emotional demands asking for competent teachers who are capable enough to regulate and manage them. The language teacher emotion regulation focuses on the strategies that language teachers implement to regulate their emotions. Considering the paucity of a psychometrically sound instrument in language teacher emotion regulation, this realm has received scant research attention. Thus, the present study was an attempt to develop and validate a conceptually meaningful and psychometrically sound instrument to capture language teacher emotion regulation strategies at workplace. This study is composed of three phases. In the first phase, based on a comprehensive consideration of the existing literature and the results of a semi-structured interview, a six-component model of the language teacher emotion regulation was designed. In the second phase, the results of exploratory factor analysis (EFA), confirmatory factor analysis (CFA), and reliability estimates confirmed the validity and reliability of the instrument. The results of CFA refined the final version of the instrument. The Language Teacher Emotion Regulation Inventory (LTERI) includes 27 items with six dimensions on a 5-point Likert scale. Each dimension assesses a discrete language teacher emotion regulation strategy at workplace: situation selection, situation modification, attention deployment, reappraisal, suppression, and seeking social support. In the third phase, the validated instrument, LTERI was utilized across two different milieus of language teaching in Iran, namely school and university. To do so, an independent samples t-test was applied. As the findings of this phase demonstrated, there is a statistically significant difference between English as a foreign language (EFL) teachers in the two contexts regarding the employed emotion regulation strategies in their professional lives. The implications of the current study can open new perspectives in educational psychology and teacher well-being. Furthermore, the Language Teacher Emotion Regulation Inventory (LTERI) contributes to the field of teacher education by filling the measurement lacuna and advancing quantitative studies in this regard. More significantly, the implications of this study may uncover new prospects for effective teaching and learning, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic, which can provoke various emotional demands for both teachers and learners.

PurposeFollowing the significant role of critical thinking (CT), sense of efficacy beliefs and teaching style preferences in the success of teachers and consequently the success of the educational system, this study intended to explore their relationship and the possible influence of these three factors among English as a Foreign Language (EFL) university professors.Design/methodology/approachTo this end, Watson–Glaser Critical Thinking Appraisal-Form A, Teacher Sense of Efficacy Scale (TSES) and Grasha's Teaching Style Inventory (TSI) were administered to 320 Iranian EFL university professors.FindingsThe data were examined via path analysis indicated that teachers' CT abilities and sense of self-efficacy beliefs significantly influenced the teaching style preferences. Moreover, it was concluded that Iranian EFL university professors' CT skills positively affect their sense of efficacy beliefs.Research limitations/implicationsFuture studies may advance the possible relationships among the sub-components of CT, self-efficacy beliefs and teaching style. Furthermore, further investigations are recommended to study the influence of university professors' CT, self-efficacy beliefs and teaching style preferences in enhancing their learners' achievement.Practical implicationsThe implications of the present study may contribute to the field of teacher education in providing opportunities for teachers to develop and practice higher-order thinking and self-assisted skills.Social implicationsThe implications of this study may redound to the advantage of university professors, teacher educators and policy-makers.Originality/valueThis research is original. To the best of the researchers' knowledge, there has been no study investigated the possible relationships between CT, sense of efficacy beliefs and teaching style preferences in higher education.

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To become proficient language users, EFL learners must be familiar with the accepted and highly used word combinations. Lewis (1997, p.8) contended that competence and proficiency in a language equals acquiring fixed prefabricated items. Collocations are a large part of these word pairs and are defined as "the way in which words co-occur in natural text in statistically significant ways". He believed that one of the most important subtypes of collocations is adjective + noun. The present study focused on the use of adjective + noun collocations by Iranian EFL learners based on noun abstractness. So, these collocations in written productions of twenty eight students at Hakim Sabzevari University were found and analyzed. The repetitions of high frequent patterns were compared to their frequency in COCA corpus in order to find out whether noun abstractness is a significant factor in learning and using adjective + noun collocations. The results revealed that the adjective + abstract noun collocations were more frequently and more efficiently used by Iranian EFL learners.

Plural marking on mass nouns in languages like English and Persian is assumed to be allowed only when the interpretation of the mass noun is subject to coercion — i.e. count reading of mass nouns. As such, plural marking serves the purpose of portioning out the undivided stuff into conventionalized units. This chapter presents facts establishing that plural marking on mass nouns in Persian, in addition to its portioning-out function, can induce definiteness. The chapter proposes that the definiteness interpretation triggered by plural morphology arises from the syntax of plural marking in Persian. Based on the descriptive generalizations made in this chapter, a Distributed-Morphology based analysis is proposed of number marking in Persian and how it interfaces with definiteness marking. I argue that number morphology in the context of definite noun phrases is syncretic in the sense that it realizes both a definiteness feature [+def] and a number feature [±pl].