Interview

Using modern, electronic technology to promote the culture and worldview of technology producers and to subjugate its consumers is the gist of what McPhail (2006) calls electronic colonialism theory (ECT). As an example of electronic technology, Internet-mediated English educational materials are rapidly growing but they do not appear to have been critically analyzed in terms of their potential hidden agenda. With this concern, the researchers conducted a survey study on “VOA Special English for Persian Learners” which is one of the most popular websites among Iranian English learners (Karimi Alavijeh, 2014). For this purpose, all VoA lessons were closely investigated in a process of qualitative content analysis through which the main themes of this program were extracted. Real samples of the content were included in a 5-point, likert-type Indigenous Iranian Culture Opinionnaire developed by the researchers. After making sure of the reliability and validity of this opinionnaire, it was responded by 151 Iranians who had been selected through stratified random sampling from a variety of educational, linguistics, ethnic, religious and social backgrounds, residing in different Iranian provinces. To take care of the accuracy of the findings in the quantitative part of the study and to meet the triangulation criterion in the qualitative phase, in depth semi-structures interviews were also conducted. The analysis of the obtained data revealed the incongruity of the supposedly “special for Persian learners” materials with Iranians’ values, supporting ECT in the sense that this program plainly serves the promotion of American culture among the Iranian learners.

There are two different trends for the study of metadiscourse, including interactive and reflexive. The reflexive model suggested by (Mauranen, 1993) and (Ädel, 2010) cares about reflexivity in language. As reflexivity plays a pivotal role in spoken genres, this study aimed to study the frequency and functions of reflexive metadiscourse markers in academic interviews. Hence, this study focused on a corpus of three academic interviews carried out in English native academic context that was taken from “The Michigan Corpus of Academe Spoken English” (MICASE). The corpus was analyzed using the model by Ädel that includes four functional categories of metalinguistic comments, discourse organization, speech act labels, and references to the audiences . The results showed that about one-quarter of the personal pronouns were metadiscourse. Besides, among the personal pronouns that perform metadiscourse function, singular first-person pronoun was the most frequent while plural first-person pronoun was very rare. It was also found that among the four functions, the interviewees and interviewers paid more attention to metalinguistic comments and references to the audience . The results of this study could add to the knowledge of those participating in interviews in general and in the academic context in particular.

During the Coronavirus pandemic, online classes and exams became popular to protect people's health. Despite the benefits, there were security issues and exam cheating. This research was conducted with the aim of comparing the amount and type of cheating in online and face-to-face exams using a qualitative method. The statistical population was all male and female students of the sixth grade of Pirbakran city in the academic year 2021-2022. In this research, a mixed rural school was selected using available sampling method and a structured face-to-face interview was conducted with all 14 sixth-grade students of the school. The interview questions were written and checked in MAXQDA software version 2020. From the analysis of the interviews, it was concluded that the rate of student cheating in online tests is much higher than that in face-to-face tests. The most common methods of cheating in online tests are the use of textbooks, the help of classmates, and the use of the Internet. Also, the most common method of cheating in face-to-face exams was the help of a classmate, and they considered the objective questions in the exams to be one of the important reasons for the ease of cheating. According to the findings of the research, the exams should be held in person as much as possible. In order to reduce cheating in the design of face-to-face and online tests, it is better to use more conceptual, in-depth and descriptive questions not published on the Internet browser; design different questions for students and explain the importance of studying and the negative points of cheating for students; replace four-choice questions with explanatory questions; increase the distance between the students in the face-to-face exam and control to prevent the presence of embedded fraud; not to answer the questions by the invigilators, and check students' pockets and hands in order to prevent cheating and avoid providing them with multiple draft sheets.