The Concept of Educational Culture Language: A Case of Labeling

The verbal interaction among students, teachers, parents, and school administrators plays a significant role in achieving educational goals as the language used in educational settings while mirroring the dominant educational culture, functions as an important tool in shaping and reshaping their beliefs. Thus, the culture language in any educational setting needs to be studied in order to identify the dominant culture. To this end, 400 natural conversations among 23 administrators, 52 teachers, 100 students, and 100 parents were reviewed and labeled according to the SPEAKING model. Results show that the used language is indicative of certain features of Iranian culture such as indirectness, collectivism, being shame oriented, holism, and added exaggeration are being exploited in pursuing goals such as complementing and admiration, blaming and demeaning, advice giving, motivating, wish fulfillment, power and domination maintenance, and threating in relation to the students. By informing educational staff of these features and their applications they can be helped in improving their language when giving feedback to students.