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To communicate effectively in any language, one needs to be competent in using four language skills; that is, reading, listening, reading, and writing- and accordingly the integrative skills instruction has come into prominence in L2 teaching. EFL teachers' beliefs, ideas, perceptions, attitudes are known to have a significant impact on their profession. Termed as "teacher cognition" by Borg (2003), the mentioned beliefs or perceptions are not directly observable. In this study, it is argued that teachers' perceptions about four language skills as a part of their teacher cognition will give insight to their instruction. This is a qualitative study which aims at finding out the prospective EFL teachers' perceptions about writing skill through metaphors. The participants included the undergraduate students studying English as a foreign language at two universities, Istanbul and Amasya. The data were analyzed with the content analysis technique. The findings revealed that prospective EFL teachers had various views regarding the nature of writing. These perceptions, either positive or negative, will influence their future practices; thus, it is essential that the awareness of prospective EFL teachers should be sharpened to help learners to understand the complicated nature of writing and proceed in writing.

This study aims to identify (1) how EFL graduate-level students at various Turkish universities regard the level of difficulty in terms of the different sections of a scholarly work in their academic writing practices, (2) whether their perceptions concerning the difficulty of the various sections show a significant difference depending on their demographics, (3) the solutions they employ when they are challenged with difficulties in academic writing and (4) their views about the process of academic writing in general. Data from 34 graduate EFL students were reported. The study adopted a mixed-method research design, and the data were collected with "Academic Literacies Questionnaire (ALQ)" (Chang, 2006; Evans & Green, 2007). The participants also responded to open-ended questions about the challenges they face in academic writing and their solutions. The results revealed that EFL graduate students had problems with academic conventions, and found expressing themselves succinctly problematic. However, they were familiar with the mechanics of the target language.

This paper aims to study the possible relations between critical reading self-efficacy and cognitive flexibility among pre-service EFL instructors. Designed as descriptive research, this study was conducted with 121 participants from a state university in western Turkey. The data were gathered through Likert scales and the analysis was conducted on SPSS packet program through the tests of Kruskal-Wallis, Mann-Whitney U, Pearson correlation as well as frequencies and percentages. The results have revealed that the pre-service EFL teachers' critical reading self-efficacy scores are high, whereas their cognitive flexibility scores are partially high. Also, there is a weak but positive relationship between the pre-service teachers' critical reading self-efficacy and cognitive flexibility. However, there is no meaningful difference between their critical reading self-efficacy or cognitive flexibility regarding their gender or the grade they are studying in. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]