---
title: "Exploring the Status of Self-Regulated Strategies and"
description: "The author used a correlational design with 39 TEFL undergraduates at the University of Hormozgan. 40 references."
authors: ["Omid Mallahi"]
year: 2024
venue: "Iranian Journal of Educational Research 3"
source: "http://ijer.hormozgan.ac.ir/article-1-186-en.pdf"
licence: "CC BY (journal licence per DOAJ; Iranian Journal of Educational Research)"
licence_url: "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/"
summary_licence: "Elamur Cosmic License"
canonical: "https://research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/mallahi-2024-exploring-status-self-regulated-strategies/"
---
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# Exploring the Status of Self-Regulated Strategies and Self-Efficacy Beliefs in Learning English Grammar among Iranian EFL Learners

**Authors:** Omid Mallahi · **Year:** 2024 · **Venue:** Iranian Journal of Educational Research 3 · **Licence:** [CC BY (journal licence per DOAJ; Iranian Journal of Educational Research)](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)

**Links:** [Publisher's page](http://ijer.hormozgan.ac.ir/article-1-186-en.pdf) · [PDF](http://ijer.hormozgan.ac.ir/article-1-186-en.pdf) · [OpenAlex](https://openalex.org/W7056887687)

**Citations:** 0 citations (OpenAlex, 2026-10-14)

## Summary
This study asks how Iranian university learners of English regulate their own grammar learning, how confident they feel about it, and whether these factors relate to their actual grammar knowledge. The author used a correlational design with 39 TEFL undergraduates at the University of Hormozgan. Each student took the Oxford Placement Test, which served both as a proficiency measure and as the basis for splitting students into intermediate and advanced groups. Students also completed Truong's (2022) questionnaire on self-regulated grammar learning strategies and a grammar self-efficacy questionnaire. The analysis combined correlations, multiple regression and MANOVA. Strategy use, self-efficacy and grammatical knowledge were all positively correlated. Among the strategy categories, only managing one's environment and behaviour significantly predicted grammar scores. Advanced students scored higher on both strategy use and self-efficacy, but only the self-efficacy gap reached significance. The author concludes that grammar teaching should be combined with explicit training in self-regulation and confidence-building. The small sample limits how far the results generalise.

## Key points
- The sample was a convenience group of 39 students (29 female, 10 male), aged 20–25, all native Persian speakers. Every participant had already passed the department's Basic and Advanced Grammar courses.
- Proficiency was measured with the Oxford Placement Test (2001). It has 60 items, a 30-minute limit, and a Cronbach's alpha of .86 in this study. Scores of 30–47 counted as intermediate and 48–60 as advanced.
- The QSRLSLEG has 33 five-point Likert items in five subscales:
  - Evaluation (6), Objectivity (5) and Monitoring (7), adapted from Howard et al.'s IMSR;
  - Seeking and Learning Information (9), drawn from Cleary's SRSI-SR, Pawlak's GLSI and Horwitz's beliefs questionnaire;
  - Managing Environment and Behavior (6), from Cleary.
- In the multiple regression, Managing Environment and Behavior (MEB) was the strategy category that significantly explained grammar knowledge.
- The MANOVA showed advanced learners ahead on both constructs, but the difference was significant only for self-efficacy.

## Interesting ideas
- Instead of treating "self-regulation" as one score, the study splits it into subscales and uses regression to find which component actually carries the effect on outcomes, which turned out to be a fairly mundane one (managing environment and behaviour).
- Proficiency groups are compared on several related outcomes jointly (MANOVA), and only then is it checked which single outcome differs significantly. This guards against over-reading many separate tests.
- The grammar-strategy definition the paper adopts separates knowing a rule declaratively from being able to apply it procedurally in real use. The paper links Iranian learners' weakness to rule memorisation without application practice.
- The Evaluation subscale captures checking whether one's work is correct while still searching for the answer, not only at the end.
- The placement test's reliability was confirmed (Cronbach's alpha) before its scores were used for grouping. This is a cheap sanity check on the measuring instrument itself.

## For Mova

How these ideas could serve Mova, our small open language model — its files, stages and tests:

- **I1** (learn): Ablate the self-repair and training loop component by component, then regress accuracy gains on each part, to see which mechanism really drives improvement rather than assuming the most sophisticated one does.
- **I2** (learn): When comparing parser or reader variants on several correlated metrics (e.g. LAS, frame accuracy, QA score), test them jointly first so that one noisy metric does not create a false "win".
- **I3** (answer): School-course tests should probe whether a reader can apply a construction in new sentences, not just whether it recognises the rule, so that rule-recall success is not mistaken for competence.
- **I4** (answer): Readers for maths word problems and fable QA could verify intermediate states (e.g. holdings after each event) against the text, making errors explainable at the step where they arise.
- **I5** (learn): Before trusting silver data, measure agreement among the witness parsers as a reliability index, and drop or down-weight slices where the witnesses are inconsistent.

*Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.*

## Institutions

Also on the byline: [University of Hormozgan](https://ror.org/003jjq839).

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## Cite

Cite as: Omid Mallahi. 2024. Exploring the Status of Self-Regulated Strategies and Self-Efficacy Beliefs in Learning English Grammar among Iranian EFL Learners. Iranian Journal of Educational Research 3.

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work.

```bibtex
@article{mallahi2024exploring,
  title = {{Exploring the Status of Self-Regulated Strategies and Self-Efficacy Beliefs in Learning English Grammar among Iranian EFL Learners}},
  author = {Omid Mallahi},
  journal = {Iranian Journal of Educational Research 3},
  year = {2024},
  url = {http://ijer.hormozgan.ac.ir/article-1-186-en.pdf}
}
```

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## References

40 references, 0 of them with a card of ours. ↗ leads to the work, «find» searches for one we have no id for yet.

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*Updated 1 November 2026*