مطالب

The irony of teaching standards policies is that they undermine the very commitments to professional autonomy that they espouse.  Positioned as condition (of competence and conduct) and consequence (of competence and conduct), autonomy becomes both philosophically and practically problematic. Drawing on the work of Jacques Derrida, the authors deconstruct the British Columbia standards policy titled “Standards for the Education, Competence, and Professional Conduct of Teachers.” Deconstruction is not aimed here at the destruction of standards policies but towards understanding and appreciating the role they can play in acknowledging that which is core to teaching and yet difficult to name within the language of standards. Our efforts are directed towards the rehabilitation of autonomy as educational responsibility that recognizes its own deep-seated and perhaps necessary contradictions.

Purpose : The purpose of this study was to develop the principles of Islamic education with an approach of freshness and vitality for the elementary school. Method : In this research, the content analysis method has been used to be able to interpret and analyze the speeches and messages related to the topic, regarding the relationship between Islamic education and vitality in the religion of Islam, books on Islamic education and the Qur'an and hadith. Findings : The findings of the present study using content analysis method, indicate that theoretically ten principles of Islamic education with a freshness and vitality approach for elementary school (aesthetic principle, principle of tolerance, principle of beauty, principle of modification, principle of ease, principles have been referred to. Dynamics and vitality in school and class, the principle of reminder, the principle of continuity, the principle of awareness and the principle of individual differences) can be explained. That is, Islamic teachings can inspire the hypotheses and theories of Islamic education with a refreshing and invigorating approach for the elementary school. Conclusion : It is important to use the principles and perspectives in practice and to evaluate the performance of Islamic education with the approach of freshness and vivacity.

This study sought to evaluate the usefulness and desirability of the English textbooks for Iranian second grade students in senior high school, Vision 2. To this end, the extent to which the textbooks materials satisfy the prescribed curriculum was explored based on Littlejohn’s (2011) evaluative framework. Employing stratified random sampling, a total of 12 private and public senior high schools (six girl students and six boy students) were selected randomly among all the schools located in the six education districts in Isfahan. To select the teacher participants, a convenience sampling method was employed and those who agreed to be surveyed took part in the study. The 20 teachers who participated in this study have been teaching Vision 2 since the beginning of 2017 fall. The process of the content analysis deals with a deeply analytical content evaluation based on a framework containing different parts (objective description analysis, subjective analysis, subjective inference) done by a teacher committee. The results revealed that there is a need to adapt the materials to the target situation of use. Such adaptation needs to cover both design- and publication-oriented aspects of the materials. As a practical implication, the findings may urge the developers of the textbooks to launch a modification project relying upon the results of the systematic phase, therefore, it may enrich English teaching and learning material in Iranian high schools.

Using evaluative language has been considered as the significant predictor of academic writing success in second and foreign language research. Such an importance paved the way for the current study to investigate the use of the APPRAISAL tool, namely ATTITUDE resources, in the research articles (RAs) written by native (N) and non-native (NN) writers, focusing on the discussion sections. A qualitative corpus selection resulted in choosing 30 RAs written by American writers and 30 authored by Iranian writers. Two coding schemes were used: one for discussion boundaries based on Kanoksilapatham’s (2005) discussion move structure, and the modified version of APPRAISAL theory (Xu, 2017) for identifying attitudinal resources. The corpus analysis revealed that academic writers preferred to use a great number of inscribed ATTITUDE resources, that is, APPRECIATION tools compared to JUDGMENT. There was also a significant difference between N and NN sub-corpora in using attitudinal resources, highlighting that the language of N RAs contained more authorial stance of ATTITUDE compared to NN sub-corpus. However, the use of idioms as evoked ATTITUDE was found to be frequently applied by NN authors. The findings of the study contributed to the significance of using evaluative language in academic writing through which the writers can make a dialogic interaction with readers and enhance their critical stance by involving them in the argument.