محسن شیرازی زاده

Scholarly publication has turned into a growing concern affecting the lives of academics across the world. The increasing demand by higher education institutions for publications in high-profile venues has created various policy issues, including the ones about the language of publication, and more specifically, about writing and publishing in English by speakers of other languages. In this study, we investigate policies of publishing in English in Iranian higher education based on qualitative content analysis of 30 national policy documents and 170 university bylaws released by 46 Iranian universities over the past twenty-three years. The emerging policy lines reveal that the research evaluation system and the structure of incentives as well as institutional pressure mechanisms all tend to act in favor of publishing in English in a context where it is the academic language of only a small minority. The implications of such policy directions for higher education in Iran are discussed along with possible messages for other contexts around the world.

The present study is an attempt to discover the relationships among reflection, role stressors and resilience. To this end, a mixed-method approach was adopted. In the quantitative phase, 122 EFL teachers completed three questionnaires namely English Language Teaching Reflection Inventory, Teacher Role Stressors Scale and Connor-Davidson Resilience Scale. The results of correlation indicated that there is a significant positive relation between reflection and resilience. However, the correlation between reflection and role stressors was found to be negative. Multiple regression revealed that of the five components of reflection, metacognitive and critical reflection are significant predictors of role ambiguity while only critical reflection can predict role conflict. Metacognitive and practical reflection were also found to be significant predictors of teachers’ resilience. In the qualitative phase, fifteen face-to-face interviews were conducted with the participants who had also taken part in the first phase of the study. Data were transcribed, coded and thematically structured based on a grounded theoretical perspective. The two main themes which emerged out of the interviews confirmed that reflection leads to resilience through strengthening teachers’ professional identity while it also leads to resilience or stress through making teachers prepared and knowledgeable. The possible justifications of the obtained results as well as the implications of this study for teaching English and teacher education in EFL context are discussed.