مجتبی قیطاسی

Teachers’ professional identity has been the topic of abundant research in recent few decades. It has been defined as the knowledge a teacher has of himself/herself in teaching contexts, and relationships that manifest themselves in practical professional undertakings. This study aimed at investigating the factors that most likely influence identity construction of Iranian EFL teachers. In this convergent mixed-method study, the data in the quantitative and the qualitative phases were collected, respectively, through a questionnaire and semi-structured interviews. The participants of the study were 75 English language teachers who teach in Iranian public schools. The quantitative data were analyzed by means of SPSS and the qualitative data were analyzed manually through thematic analysis. The findings showed that the majority of the participants believed that gaining experience has been the most determining factor in construction of their identities as EFL teachers. Other factors such as inspiration of previous teachers, peer learning and particularly the university programs, however, have been less effective or have had little effect in this regard. This study has implications for ELT stake-holders.

Textbooks in ELT perform different functions since their content can serve different purposes. Particularly, the content of textbooks can affect learners’ views to a great deal. Accordingly, designing ELT textbooks can generate much disagreement. Thus, textbook content is considered important and demands critical evaluation. This study explored the representation of national identity in the English Vision textbook series for Iranian senior high schools. For this aim, corpus analysis and content analysis were carried out, respectively, aimed at providing a description of the terms associated with nationalities, and describing aspects of national identity represented in the textbooks. The data in the corpus analysis phase were collected through obtaining frequencies of reference to nations and in the content analysis phase by means of a researcher-made checklist. Results revealed that Iranian identity is the most frequent aspect, for which 13 categories of reference were observed. Similarly, six major themes were found regarding aspects of national identity. This study offers implications for Iranian education policy-makers, textbook designers, and education practitioners.

This study evaluated the cultural content of Vision textbook series that are currently in use in Iranian public secondary school system. The aim was to find the most frequent cultural references as well as the most-frequently-represented cultural senses. For this purpose, frequency counts were used to collect the data and the culture categorization framework (Adaskou et. al., 1990) and cultural reference framework (Cortazzi & Jin, 1999), modified by Tajeddin and Teimournezhad (2014), were used to analyze the data. Results of the frequency counts indicated that the Vision ELT textbooks contained the most cultural content associated with Persian as the source culture. Similarly, the focus was primarily on the esthetic sense of culture, followed respectively by semantic, sociological and sociolinguistic (pragmatic) senses. The study ends up with implications for EFL stake-holders in Iranian context as well as the ELT enterprise in general.