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This article reports on the results of two international systematic research reviews which focus on different aspects of teaching grammar to improve the quality and accuracy of 5–16-year-olds' writing in English. The results show that there is little evidence to indicate that the teaching of formal grammar is effective; and that teaching sentence-combining has a more positive effect. In both cases, however, despite over a hundred years of research and debate on the topic, there is insufficient quality of research to prove the case with either approach. More research is needed, as well as a review of policy and practice in England with regard to the teaching of sentence structure in writing

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The paper explores the influence of culture on the sense of self-efficacy in teaching EFL (English as a Foreign Language) of a group of university teachers in Vietnam. Research exploring the relationship between culture and self-efficacy is extremely rare despite the acknowledged importance of culture in the formation of self-efficacy beliefs. This study took the form of qualitative research with diverse, data collection instruments: individual interviews, focus group discussions, observations and journaling. Findings indicate that certain features of the Vietnamese cultural context impacted on the way the study teachers constructed their sense of selfefficacy. Specifically, under the influence of a Vietnamese sense of belonging, the study teachers tended to rely more on efficacy-building information from other people rather than from themselves. The perception of inequality in power may have heightened negative emotional arousal, thus contributing to a negative sense of selfefficacy among the teachers. The Vietnamese concept of face and the high status of teachers in the social hierarchy in part mediated teachers' sense of self-efficacy. The perceived burden of performing both parenting and teaching roles and responsibilities may have diminished the self-efficacy in teaching of female teachers. Finally, the contribution and implications of the study are discussed.

The study reported on here focuses on self-efficacy in relation to high-school teachers' teaching of writing. 140 New Zealand teachers from four schools completed a teacher-ofwriting self-efficacy scale (TWSES) based on a rhetorical model of the writing process and incorporating five hypothesized dimensions. An initial principal components analysis was undertaken on 25 individual self-efficacy items to investigate the dimensionality of the data and the extent to which it reflected the dimensions hypothesized. A twocomponent solution emerged, termed "pre-writing instructional strategies" (accounting for 52% of total variance) and "compositional strategy demonstration" (7% of variance). Further principal components analyses conducted on groups of items deemed to be thematically coherent, that loaded on each component, confirmed that the data set for each group, treated separately to any other items, was approximately uni-dimensional. Measurement scales were calibrated to each group of items, and served as the dependent variables for comparisons of teachers' self-efficacy in different subjects. Statistically significant variations occurred in the resultant scale locations for teachers of English, the humanities, science and mathematics. The study findings have implications for the teaching of writing as conceptualized in the secondary school, and indicate a value in viewing disciplinary literacies in rhetorical terms.