مطالب

Medical practitioners’ ethnocentric orientations and English language skills contribute to the success or failure of intercultural communication in the context of health care. The present study aims to investigate the relationship between ethnocentrism and investment in learning English in the multicultural setting of English classrooms at an Iranian medical university. To this end, 200 Iranian medical students’ levels of ethnocentrism and investment in learning English were measured. The findings of this study revealed that the participants had relatively moderate levels of ethnocentrism and investment, and there was a strong negative relationship between the two constructs. Female medical students were found to be significantly less ethnocentric than male students, but were not significantly different from them in terms of investment. These findings were explained considering several contextual factors such as the participants’ linguistic loyalty, intercultural contact, and social comfort in English classrooms. Practical implications, direction, and limitations are discussed.

During the pandemic of COVID-19, face to face class sessions, in education systems, have been suspended due to various recommendations of governments. To continue teaching and learning, universities have switched to online learning. In the past two years, implementation of online learning, despite its benefits for higher education, has had its drawbacks and students have faced to a variety of challenges. The primary purpose of this study is to investigate the perceptions and opinions of undergraduate engineering students at the University of Tehran about the existing challenges, and their suggestions for making the online learning more efficient in engineering education. This research is performed using a mixed model. A conceptual research model was designed that categorized the main elements of effective online learning into three categories: learners, instructors, and content, and then based on this conceptual model, a questionnaire including Likert and open-ended questions was developed to determine the challenges facing engineering students in online learning in the Corona era. By distributing this questionnaire among incoming engineering students of Tehran University in 2019 and 2020 and analyzing quantitative and qualitative data, to two questions, "What have been the challenges of engineering students in online learning during the Corona era?" And "How has the quality of online engineering education been during the corona pandemic?", was answered. For analysis, qualitative data were coded and categorized using the thematic analysis method and using MAXQDA, and the frequency of each category and code was determined. Quantitative data were also analyzed by statistical analysis methods including descriptive statistics and t-test of independent groups in the SPSS, and then two sets of findings obtained from quantitative and qualitative data were summarized and combined. Based on the results, students' challenges during the pandemic were categorized into five groups: personal challenges, limited social interaction, technology problems, evaluation issues, and concerns about content and teaching methods. Students’ feedback is an important tool in assessing the quality of online courses but other stakeholders’ conceptions and feedbacks should be studied in future research as well.