| Deconstructing Foreign Languages Education Policy in Iran: A Documentary Analysis |
| Paper ID : 1072-CNF-FULL |
| Authors |
|
علیرضا راستی * بخش آموزش زبان انگلیسی، دانشکده ادبیات، دانشگاه سلمان فارسی کازرون |
| Abstract |
| Due to the highly normative and legitimatory nature of policies at large and education policies in particular, they mostly formulate problems as seen through and colored by the perspective of official policy-makers and offer solutions to the issues promoted by them. On the surface, this staged process of policy design, implementation, and evaluation might be assumed to run a smooth course yielding desirable results to all the policy actors engaged one way or another with policy conception and/or action. Poststructuralist analytic tools and concepts have the potential to shed some light on how policies unfold and what challenges they meet along the way. They are an invaluable resource at the hands of the consumer of policy, especially those at the grassroots level, in exposing the official version of reality as showcased in policy, which might be incongruous with the needs and wants of 'frontline' educators, vis-à-vis teachers. In keeping with this, this study looked into foreign languages education policy (FLEP) texts in the Iranian context in an attempt at showing how policy as a discursive construct can be problematized so that it could be seen as a site of struggle rather than a taken-for-granted process of introducing and bringing about change. The results shoswed that such documents seemingly adopt a positivistic stance on the implementation of FLEP policy, and that the Communicative Approach is promoted as a panacea for all the ills plaguing the language education practitioners, leaving off simplistically many contributing factors and entities from the language pedagogy equation. |
| Keywords |
| language-in-education policy, Iran, document analysis, poststructuralism |
| Status: Accepted |