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ABSTRACT
The worldwide English language teaching enterprise is mostly known by its professional and practical features such as teaching methodology and proficiency tests which tend to overshadow the cultural politics of language education and broader policy-level issues. To probe aspects of such less-addressed concerns and with a consideration of the crucial role of policies in education, including English language education, in this paper we explore officially stated English teaching policies in Iran as well as implicitly embraced de facto policy orientations in this area and their possible (mis)matches. Four major national documents bearing policy messages for English language education are examined as sources of overt national policies in this regard. Moreover, to observe parts of the related covert policies, we employ data obtained from interviews with teachers of private language teaching institutes as representative settings of real-life English teaching in Iran. Based on the illustration of the two types of policies and specifically considering the sociocultural implications of embracing or avoiding elements of these policies, we raise some concerns regarding the overall direction of English language education in Iran that could apply to the wider non-English-speaking world as well.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes on contributors
Seyyed-Abdolhamid Mirhosseini is an Assistant Professor at Alzahra University in Tehran, Iran. His research areas include sociopolitics of language education, critical discourse studies, and qualitative research methodology. He is the co-editor of Confronting Academic Knowledge (Iran University Press, 2011) and Instances of Islamophobia (Lexington Books, 2015), and the editor of a forthcoming volume on Qualitative Research in Language and Literacy Education (contracted with Springer). His writing has appeared in several edited volumes and journals including Applied Linguistics; Critical Inquiry in Language Studies; Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education; Language, Culture and Curriculum; and Language Problems and Language Planning.
Sepideh Khodakarami received her MA in Teaching English as a Foreign Language from Alzahra University, Tehran, Iran.
Notes on contributors
Seyyed-Abdolhamid Mirhosseini is an Assistant Professor at Alzahra University in Tehran, Iran. His research areas include sociopolitics of language education, critical discourse studies, and qualitative research methodology. He is the co-editor of Confronting Academic Knowledge (Iran University Press, 2011) and Instances of Islamophobia (Lexington Books, 2015), and the editor of a forthcoming volume on Qualitative Research in Language and Literacy Education (contracted with Springer). His writing has appeared in several edited volumes and journals including Applied Linguistics; Critical Inquiry in Language Studies; Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education; Language, Culture and Curriculum; and Language Problems and Language Planning.
Sepideh Khodakarami received her MA in Teaching English as a Foreign Language from Alzahra University, Tehran, Iran.