The study reflected in the present paper investigated the relationship between Iranian EFL learners' self-regulation, critical thinking ability and their language achievement. The researchers of the present study set out to investigate this association based on theoretical contention in the literature postulating a dynamic interplay between self-regulatory skills and critical thinking ability as well as empirical studies demonstrating the association of each of these constructs with academic achievement. To the researchers' best knowledge, there is hardly any documented study exploring the relationship between these constructs among EFL learners. To attain the purpose of the study, 82 EFL university learners were selected according to a convenience sampling from different universities in Mashhad, a city in the northeast of Iran. They were requested to complete the "Watson-Glaser's Critical Thinking Appraisal" and the "Self-Regulation Trait Questionnaire". They were also asked to indicate the grade point average of their previous term. The data supported the theoretical expectation of a linkage between self-regulation and critical thinking. Subsequent data analyses indicated that among the components of self-regulation, self-monitoring and self-efficacy have the highest correlations and are the positive predictors of critical thinking. In addition, the results demonstrated that EFL learners' self-regulation can predict about 53 % of their language achievement while their critical thinking ability tends to predict about 28% of achievement. The conclusions and recommendations derived from the present study should encourage

Teaching can be considered as an extremely demanding and stressful occupation and being a language educator brings about its own distinctive challenges. In the wake of COVID-19 pandemic, teachers worldwide experienced fundamental changes in their profession and their lives as a whole. Coping with such an unprecedented situation and responses to it have created new and extra stressful factors for teachers to cope with, including the difficulties created by quick transition from direct teaching to virtual and remote teaching. This study examined EFL teachers' coping strategies during the Covid-19 virtual education and their association with work engagement and teacher apprehension. A total of 296 language instructors contributed to this study by participating in a survey in January 2021. To determine what coping strategies teachers use in virtual teaching during Covid-19, the researchers adapted the Brief-COPE scale designed and validated by Carver (Int J Behav Med 4:92–100, 1997) to make it appropriate for virtual education. The survey measured 11 coping strategies divided into two broad types, approach and avoidant. For measuring work engagement, the Work and Well-being Survey (UWES) scale designed and validated by Schaufeli and Bakker (Test manual for the Utrecht work engagement scale, vol 3. Utrecht University, The Netherlands, pp. 44–52, 2003. http://www.schaufeli.com ) was utilized. To assess teachers' apprehension, the research employed the Sources of Teachers' Apprehension Scale (STAS) developed by Ghanizadeh et al. (Asia-Pac Educ Res 1–14, 2020). The result demonstrated that the adapted coping strategies scale enjoys acceptable reliability and validity indices. The results estimated via structural equation modeling (SEM) revealed that EFL teachers' approach coping strategies positively and significantly predicted work engagement ( β = 0.72, t = 10.56). Work engagement was negatively predicted by avoidant coping strategies ( β = − 0.29, t = − 3.36). Teacher apprehension was negatively influenced by approach coping strategies ( β = − 0.44, t = − 5.57) and positively by avoidant coping strategies ( β = 0.43, t = 5.29). The study proposes some practical recommendations for overcoming the Covid-19 related challenges which could further deliver valuable guidance for supporting future training of teachers.

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Given that Emergentism is convincingly a novel challenge in the field of applied linguistics and is hotly under debate nowadays, its proponents especially Nick Ellis and his colleagues advocate it as a main alternative to the assumptions of Universal Grammar (UG) proposed by Noam Chomsky. As its main tenet, a plethora of contemporary emergentist research contend that language acquisition can be abridged to the use of simple learning strategies to pull out statistical regularities present in regular linguistic input which is exactly harmonious with what chaos, complexity scholars believe in considering the features of chaotic complex systems. In fact, emergentist scholars believe that knowledge of language is shaped in response to opportunities to interpret and/or form utterances in the course of communication.Therefore, Emergentism is an obvious challenge to UG as it disputes some of its major assumptions. In compliance with Emergentism and chaos complexity theory, the present paper tries to illustrate the implausibility of Chomskian account of language acquisition in terms of UG. What's more, the present paper sheds light on those aspects of language in which the Chomskian nativist paradigm fails to account including the explanatory adequacy of those cases and the reasons why both Emergentism and Chaos complexity theory are in dominant positions.

The present study investigates the impact of higher order thinking enhancing techniques as two post-reading strategies on the EFL students' reasoning power as determined by their private speech production. Also, the relationship between the learners' private speech production and their reasoning power is also investigated. In so doing, the study utilizes a quasi-experimental design with 30 participants in each control and experimental groups. The results of the pretest administration indicate that the participants of the two groups are homogenous regarding their language proficiency level as determined by the Babel Test, and their reasoning power as determined by the Watson-Glaser Critical Thinking Appraisal (W-GCTA). The participants in the experimental group are instructed in a way to enhance their reasoning power based on 6 reading comprehension texts. WGCTA's two subtests of deduction and inference making which contain reasoning-gap tasks are utilized as the posttest. While the participants are engaged in carrying out such tasks, their private speech productions are recorded. Data analysis and transcription indicate that private speech which is categorized into 4 classes in this study has a positive and significant influence on the learners' reasoning power. Higher order thinking enhancing techniques are also found to have impact on the experimental group in enhancing their private speech production and subsequently improving their reasoning. The detailed results, discussion, and conclusions of the research are further presented.