Teachers’ teaching styles, sense of efficacy and reflectivity as correlates of students’ achievement outcomes

There is nowadays a burgeoning research base, mostly in mainstream education, acknowledging that teachers have the most important impact on studentsʹ achievement outcomes. This line of research, however, has not yet found its way into second language pedagogy and little, if any, empirical evidence exists on which set of EFL teacher characteristics promotes positive student learning outcomes. In line with this argument, the present study investigated three important teacher-related variables, i.e. teaching styles, teachers’ sense of efficacy, and teacher reflectivity to see how they relate to student achievement gains in ELT. 30 EFL teachers teaching in Ilam (Iran) high schools participated in this study. The final exam score of the participantsʹ students served as the dependent variable of the study. The results of multiple regression analysis (R=.91) showed that the three variables investigated can significantly predict student achievement outcomes. Besides the R value, the results showed individual correlations between each pair of the variables which reveal interesting relationships.