We have been living with this pain: enquiry-based language learning in Iranian higher education

This article explores an understanding of learning as authentic enquiry and language as a social practice of meaning construction as the theoretical perspectives underlying an educational initiation beyond mainstream tertiary language education. With a general ethnographic approach and relying on multiple data sources, we investigate critical practices of teaching medical English in an Iranian university and illustrate a contextualized instance of enquiry-based language learning that embodies enquiry and discovery in two senses: students’ research and learning about the content for oneself, and moving away from spoon-feeding views of academic language education to experience language in real social contexts. On this basis, we argue for stepping beyond predetermined content-based approaches to university language teaching and call for living the language that is being learned, which involves enquiring, experiencing, discovering, challenging, and owning it.     

Perspectives of Iranian University Students on Learning English: A Practical Need and/or an International Policy-push?

While English is embraced worldwide as a global means of communication, its teaching and learning is a contested arena of contacts between the so-called English native-speaker culture and local learner cultures. In this study, we investigate Iranian university students’ viewpoints on the necessity and justifications for learning English and their awareness of international policies of promoting this language. A group of 855 male and female students of different fields of study at six major universities of Tehran responded to a researcher-made questionnaire and 28 participants were interviewed for more in-depth explanations about their standpoints. The findings indicate that the participants are in absolute favour of learning the English language as an undeniable necessity as a multifaceted communicative instrument. Moreover, they seem to have limited sensitivity to the potential sociopolitical functioning of English and the policies and plans for promoting the teaching and learning of this language around the world.     

Resisting magic waves: ideologies of “English language teaching” in Iranian newspaper advertisements

Discourse practices play crucial roles in shaping the cultural environment of social events and, therefore, influence how they actually take place. Promotional materials and media advertisements are significant instances of such discourses through which understandings of social practices, including language education, are both reflected and shaped. In this study, I explore the advertisements of Iranian private language teaching institutes appearing in Hamshahri newspaper to uncover ideologies behind them and to examine the subtleties of how the advertisements represent and at the same time reproduce the ideological assumptions regarding “English language teaching” in Iran. A contextual investigation of ideological presuppositions underlying the discourse of these advertisements reveals that they tend to reproduce mystified instrumentalist images of language learning. From a critical view of language education, I discuss this simplistic ideological representation and the obligation of the profession of language education to address it.     

“I love foreigners’ attitudes towards life”: Reproducing lifestyles in an Iranian English language teaching context

An important aspect of learning a foreign language is encountering the sociocultural orientations associated with it. The present qualitative study focuses on an Iranian setting of English language teaching (ELT) to explore the potential reflection and reproduction of certain cultural attitudes and lifestyles in this context. A total of 200 hours of 10 ELT classes with 62 students were observed and/or recorded in 4 months, and 20 teachers and students were interviewed. Based on a grounded theory approach, the bodies of data were explored through coding procedures and the emerging thematic structure was used to illustrate aspects of the possible reproduction of lifestyles. The context of concern appeared to provide a potential arena of naturalising aspects of imported lifestyles associated with the foreign language. Although students show various extents of adherence to their own culture, prolonged involvement in ELT discursive practices may contribute to the subtle alteration of their lifestyle orientations.     

Writing the World in a Foreign Language

Decades of theorisation and research on the teaching and learning of second-language writing have hardly created coherent theoretically profound and practically relevant understandings of writing instruction. This article discusses the possibilities and insights created by bringing personal meaningfulness into the realm of writing pedagogy. Briefly revisiting the mainstream landscape of second-language writing theory and, more specifically, addressing aspects of (im)personal academic writing and publishing, we present an overview of the notion of wor(l)d writing, which implies the intimate interconnection of writing and the writer’s individual and social identity. Recognising the role of linguistic forms, cognitive processes and socio-political situatedness of writing practices, such a perspective underscores the importance of balancing these elements and going beyond them by bringing the self of the writer into the writing practice. On this basis, we argue that language and literacy education may be enhanced by acknowledging the little-explored wonders of writing and understanding it as an act of composing and narrating the word-world of the self-other.     

Doing qualitative research: the craft of naturalistic inquiry

Certain aspects of Thai Buddhism offer interesting support for some key concepts in action research. In particular, Buddhist notions of ‘insight’ and ‘mindfulness’ are helpful in clarifying the ‘reflection’ phase in the well-known action research ‘spiral’, and the concept of ‘Dependent Origination’ can be seen as embodying the whole action research cycle.