Discursive ripple effects in language policy and practice

English Language Teaching in Iran: A Case of Shifting Sands, Ambiguity, and Incoherent Policy and Practice

English language teaching (ELT) in Iran has experienced a turbulent history reflecting an often dynamic context and changing attitudes toward English, yet framed within a discourse of tolerance rather than one of embrace, as this study is going to show. The discourse was much brighter before the Islamic Revolution and this study reveals that there were much fewer adverse policies toward the spr...

Discursive Approaches to Understanding Teacher Collaboration: Policy Into Practice

critical period effects in foreign language learning:the influence of maturational state on the acquisition of reading,writing, and grammar in english as a foreign language

since the 1960s the age effects on learning both first and second language have been explored by many linguists and applied linguists (e.g lennerberg, 1967; schachter, 1996; long, 1990) and the existence of critical period for language acquisition was found to be a common ground of all these studies. in spite of some common findings, some issues about the impacts of age on acquiring a second or...

Issues with Language Policy and Planning in Iranian Higher Education

In this study, we attempt to bring to light various organisational and implementational clashes relevant to the conceptualisation of language policies at national level, and the planning of local practices with regard to degree programmes, language journals and conferences in Iranian higher education. We also prove that in its current status, the ELT syllabus in Iran, both at national and local...

Language policy, language practice and language attitudes in the early Soviet Union

This essay is essentially divided into three parts. The first part is going to focus on early Soviet attitudes towards the Russian language itself, followed by a discussion of the early Soviet policies regarding non-Russian languages in the second part. The gradual shift away from the liberal language policies of the 1920s towards the new policies emerging in the late 1930s, overtly imposing Ru...