مطالب

Today, using international relations theories is essential for explaining and analyzing international events and issues. One of the most influential international relations theories is structuralism or neorealism, developed by Kenneth Waltz, which divides into offensive and defensive. Brett Hansen, Toft, and Wivel, with their amendments to Kenneth Waltz's neo-realism, have proposed a model of neo-realism to explain international politics and the foreign behavior of governments. In this model, the strategy of governments against a single pole is affected by the probability of their military conflict. Therefore, if the likelihood of military conflict is low, governments' strategy against a single pole is "Bandwagoning." If the probability of military conflict is high, their approach will be "Balance." What influences the balance and sequence of "Hard" or "Soft" will be "Ideology." In this article, using a descriptive-analytical method, we deal with the confrontation between Iran and the United States. We will say that due to the high probability of conflict and the tremendous ideological distance between them in the region, the Islamic Republic of Iran's strategy against the United States is "Hard Balance."

The Nowruz speeches of the Supreme Leader of the Revolution are considered as drawing the lines of the country's one-year plans in line with long-term policies and macro-goals of the system. Therefore, paying attention to these statements and their scientific analysis to identify problems and provide practical solutions to overcome them, it seems necessary. The purpose of this article is to analyze the content of the speeches of the Supreme Leader of the Revolution between 2016- 2020 and to answer the main question of what axes and categories the Supreme Leader has focused and emphasized in his speeches at the beginning of each year. What are the problems and difficulties mentioned? The research method used is quantitative and qualitative content analysis. In this method, the basic axes hidden in the text, the relationship between the categories as well as the time conditions or in other words, the conceptual model of each lecture have been extracted. The research findings show that during the five years in question, the main focus of leadership discussions in the opening speech of each year was economic issues and the Supreme Leader of the Revolution has always emphasized the issue of economics and in particular the "resistance economy" approach. In addition to the resistance economy, the Supreme Leader also stressed the main issue of Iran's foreign policy, namely Borjam, and the need for hostility, especially regarding how to interact with the United States and Europe.

The subject of resistance mainly brings to mind the "Islamic Resistance Front" in the West Asian region. However, the Resistance Front is only a part of the resistance discourse. The purpose of this article is to explain the theory and experience of the resistance as a discourse. Resistance in the political thought and action of the Supreme Leader is a discourse rooted in the Qur'an, the history of Islam, Iran and especially the first four decades of the Islamic Revolution. According to these religious, historical and political principles, the discourse of resistance is the guiding role of the Islamic Revolution in step The second plays the Islamic Revolution. Resistance is a comprehensive discourse that includes various areas of domestic and foreign policy of the Islamic Republic. In this article, the roots, levels and function of the resistance discourse are explained based on the statements of the Supreme Leader and especially the supreme document of the second step of the Islamic Revolution. The data of this research have been extracted from the first category sources including the statements of the Supreme Leader and the latest sources and have been processed by descriptive-analytical method. Keywords: Resistance Discourse, Second Step Statement, Islamic Revolution, Supreme Leader, Dominance System

In line with the technological advancement during the last few decades, virtual learning has been addressed more widely, which affected English language teaching and learning as well. Since Covid 19 pandemic, which has resulted in the long-lasting closure of educational settings worldwide, virtual learning as the alternative of traditional education has been developed unprecedentedly. An option for virtual learning specifically for language teaching is teaching on the phone which has been mostly neglected in educational research. The aim of this study was to analyse the lived experience of 16 adult English language learners who experienced learning English through one-to-one, audio call sessions. Due to the pandemic, semi-structured interviews were conducted on the phone, which were recorded, transcribed and thematically analysed with a phenomenological approach. Many times revisions of the statements driven from the transcriptions resulted in six themes namely: a) learning on-the-phone as a new, satisfying experience, b) advantages, and c) disadvantages of one-to-one audio sessions, d) the participants’ preferences, e) the requisites of on-the-phone-learning, and f) the expectations of on-the-phone teacher, According to the result of this study, some educational recommendations for improving on-the-phone teaching are: covering four language skills through developing individualised lesson plans based on each learner’s needs and English language proficiency level; holding group video sessions along with one-to-one audio sessions; and using the facilities of messengers like WhatsApp to send audio, video and textual files to learners based on their needs and learning objectives.

The global pandemic of COVID-19 has brought about many changes and challenges in our lives, interactions, relationships, and modes of learning and teaching and helped us learn how to adapt ourselves to unanticipated conditions to survive. It stimulated universities, schools, and institutions of higher education to rethink and restructure their policies to find solutions to the problems as well as researchers all around the world to help educational systems get out of the mess. This study aimed to contribute to the body of literature and investigated the impacts of COVID-19 on English language teacher education. Convenience sampling was employed to recruit thirty student teachers as the participants of the study. To do the study, the author used semi-structured interviews, focus group interviews (n = 20), student teachers' reflective journals (n = 10), and his own reflective journals to collect the data. Grounded theory was used for data analysis. The findings of the study revealed that there was a shift from anomaly to congruity, student teachers saw the pandemic as an opportunity, they felt the need for technology inclusion, development, and promotion in their educational contexts, there was an urgent need to train teachers and learners to use technology in their contexts to keep the education running, and teachers had to reconstruct their identities and turn to formative assessment. The findings can contribute to the body of literature and prompt English language teacher education programs, teacher educators, administrators, teachers, and policymakers to consider the findings while they are designing, upgrading, reforming, and running their syllabi, curriculums, and programs.

The upheaval time of COVID-19 highlighted the importance of an effective way of teaching English to the front-line healthcare workers such as medical doctors and researchers with different digital-divide status, particularly in non-English-speaking countries because they were first-hand users of critical pandemic-related information in mostly-English articles published online by scientific journals. This study attempted to investigate the pedagogical effects of utilizing the two main User-Generated Content (UGC) platforms in E-learning, namely LMS vs. LXP, on the results of the Electronic Ministry of Health Language Examinations (E-MHLE) among Iranian English for Medical Purposes (EMP) learners across their digital-divide status (digital natives vs. digital immigrants) during the COVID-19 pandemic. A series of focus-group E-interviews were conducted to determine the reasons behind the lowest scores among the participants and to find out possible suggestions for success in high-stake E-tests. To this end, 272 EMP learners who were users of LMS and LXP were conveniently selected from a university of medical science to participate in this sequential explanatory mixed-method research. The results of descriptive and inferential statistics showed that the LXP group outperformed the LMS one in the results of E-MHLE. Moreover, the digital natives obtained higher scores than the digital immigrants in both groups but the difference was not significant in the LXP. The findings of the E-interviews were thematically analyzed and discussed. The findings of this study might offer practical and realistic benefits to the whole EMP community, particularly policymakers for the post-COVID-19 era.