مطالب

The importance of language teacher identity has been widely recognized recently as teachers’ professional development is highly influenced by the ways teachers view themselves. Critical orientation towards identity has also received considerable attention recently. The present study, thus, investigated the effect of a Critical Teacher Education Course (CTEC) on EFL teachers’ identity (re)construction. The participants included thirteen teachers who were first interviewed using a 20-question interview checklist whose items enabled the researchers to elicit teachers’ professional identity with a focus on critical pedagogical orientation. The teachers then attended an in-service CTEC held for ten sessions. The course was primarily dialogue-based where different premises of transformative education and critical pedagogy were introduced and discussed. This was followed by the second interview session in which the teachers were asked the same questions as the first interview. In the meantime, the teachers were also required to critically reflect on their classroom practices through reflective journals. The data were subjected to content analysis (inductive category development). The findings revealed that prior to their participation, the teachers viewed teaching English as a neutral act unaffected by contextual factors, whereas after the CTEC, they became more aware of the social, cultural, economic and political factors that might affect the whole process. Secondly, compliance with the rules and regulations, policies, and the status quo marked teachers' identities. However, they changed to more integrative teachers with critical orientations after CTEC. The findings might imply that EFL teacher training/education programmes become more localized, dialogic, interaction-based, negotiation-oriented and integration-driven.

The present study was an evaluation attempt to investigate the practicality of interpretation procedures proposed by Fairclough (1989) in the critical analysis of Persian texts. The evaluation was implemented on the basis of a goodness criterion, analytical induction (AI) framework developed by Silverman (1993). In so doing, we went about the interpretation of the inaugural speech made by the president of Iran, Dr. Rohani to the United Nations General Assembly in New York in 2013. The interpretation was done according to the Fairclough’s interpretation model in light of AI theoretical framework. The outcome of the study supported the practicality of the overall interpretation model in the Iranian context. However, considering Iranian special sociolinguistic context, the study also put forward some suggestions with respect to the interpretation of local coherence and text structure in the lower section of the model as well as situational context and intertextual context in upper section.  

Taking into account the decrease in public presence in religious places, it appears that one of the main reasons for the los t connection between audiences and sacred sites is the lack of sense of place. Creating a sense of place is the job of architects who utilize several factors to this end. The objective of the present s tudy is to show that in designing, an architect considers a set of the personal unconscious mind and collective unconscious mind to achieve the optimum design based on the needs and a sense of place. Hypotheses were formed based on this. The mos t complete among them was that the mos t solid and adequate unders tanding of place is composed in a space that encompasses a combination of the two groups of semantic and physical archetypes. A variety of phenomenological, environment psychology, and analytical approaches helped the s tudy to realize its objective. A combination of field and library s tudies provided qualitative and quantitative data to the researcher that were analyzed using the Delphi technique. The data obtained by a ques tionnaire were analyzed using analytical hierarchy process 1 (AHP). The findings showed that inducing a sense of place in the Iranian mosque depended on semantic archetypes, and creating, s trengthening, and ensuring the survival of these archetypes turned on more robus t use of physical archetypes.