مطالب

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.

Autonomous learning and social activity have excessively been the focus of interest in second language acquisition over the past decades. The present study aimed to explore how activity theory-as a branch of sociocultural theory focusing on social context-can promote Iranian EFL learners’ autonomy. To this end, fifty-six EFL students studying English translation at the Islamic Azad University, Tehran Central Branch, participated in the study. The participants were assigned to two groups, one experimental group and one control group. At the beginning of the semester, both groups took a language proficiency test to ensure their homogeneity. They also completed an autonomy questionnaire as the pre-test and post-test. The instruction in both groups was based on a five-step process of developing the academic writing skill, including prewriting, organizing, writing the first draft, revising and editing, and writing a new draft. However, only the experimental group received the instruction through an e-learning platform designed based on the six elements of activity theory-subjects, objects, mediating artifacts, rules, community, and division of labor-suitable for EFL writing classrooms. The results revealed that integrating activity theory to e-learning had a decisive role in enhancing the students’ learner autonomy. It is hoped that the findings raise both teachers and students’ awareness of implementing activity theory as a social learning framework to foster autonomous learning in EFL contexts.