External Factors and Iranian EFL Teachers’ Performance: Examining the Effectiveness of Self- regulation

This paper follows a two-fold First it examines the relationship between the external factors of compensation, support, empowerment, boundaries and expectations, pre-service and in- service training and Iranian EFL teachers’ performance. Second, it searches for the moderating effect of self-regulation on the relationship between teachers’ external assets and their performance. To achieve the above aims, a quantitative approach to research was employed. The samples included two hundred Iranian EFL teachers of universities and English institutes of Kerman, Iran. The data were collected by means of self-administered questionnaires and analyzed by AMOS software. The direct structural model was employed to determine the path relationships between the external factors and teachers’ performance. The result showed that external assets had a positive and significant effect on the Iranian EFL teachers' performance as dependent variable (β = .372, C. R= 6.211, P <.05). Moreover, self-regulation moderates the path relation between two of the variables: boundaries and expectation and the EFL teachers' performance. The path relation between the other four variables of the external assets including pre-service and in- service training, support, compensation and empowerment for low and high self-regulation was not found to be significant, i.e. self-regulation moderation effect for these relations was not supported. Working conditions for teachers should be best promote effective learning and enable teachers to concentrate on their professional tasks.