English Language Teaching (ELT)

Despite their widespread popularity and rapid growth, the Internet-mediated English educational materials for learners of English as a foreign/second language (FL/SL) have rarely been analyzed in terms of their potential hidden curriculum. Accordingly, the present study aims to address this need through conducting a CDA investigation into some lessons which are randomly selected from an English educational website called “Englishcentral.” Adapting, expanding, and adopting some elements of Van Leeuwen’s (2008) Social Actor Network, the researchers attempt to describe and explain the representation of “Iran” in Englishcentral. Investigating and thematizing the research data revealed that the keyword “Iran” was used in this website to refer to three groups of social actors, namely the Iranian government and officials, Iranian people, and Iranian people and/or government/officials. The way these social actors are associated and dissociated, activated and passivated, personalized and impersonalized creates remarkable findings which give support to the presence of particular hidden agenda in this program. In all, the results of this study reveal that the Iranian social actors are portrayed unfavorably in Englishcentral, which is an alleged English educational program.

Literature review indicates that an effective and good teacher has an important role in students' performances and their success. Pivotal roles of teachers may affect students’ attitudes and motivations to language learning. Improving the field of foreign language teaching and learning without improving the qualities of EFL teachers seems impossible. This attempt, at first hand, requires recognizing and identifying the qualities of effective EFL teachers. The purpose of this study was to characterize and investigate qualities of an effective English language teacher (EELT) as perceived by Iranian English language learners. A questionnaire which was based on four categories including English proficiency, pedagogical knowledge, organization and communication skills, and socio-affective skills was administered to 60 foreign language learners at Azad University of Tabriz. The collected data were statistically analyzed. The results showed that students expect a good English teacher to have the ability to develop proper relationships with students, ability to build students’ confidence, ability to maintain discipline in the classroom as the most important points. The findings of the present study have some useful implications for language teachers to know more about the perceptions and opinion of the students about themselves. They can plan and implement behaviors and activities that would encourage learners to get involved more in the English language learning process.

Pedagogic discourse is inherently multimodal, and teaching is a multimodal experience that takes place through the integration of (spoken) language and an array of other communicative modes. Similarly, modern multimedia platforms, such as Instagram, also have the potential to be used as multimodal educational tools that make use of different modalities alongside text. As such, the present study aimed to analyze three prominent Instagram pages, including BBC Learning English, Learning English with Oxford, and Learning English with Cambridge, through the multimodal discourse analysis toolkit proposed by Ledin and Machin (2020). Qualitative data analysis was run to analyze the data. The findings of the study indicated that the English Language Teaching (ELT) pages analyzed employed a diverse array of semiotic resources, spanning from the incorporation of various images to the careful selection of different colors and typography to effectively convey their intended meanings. Additionally, the visual representations employed in the posts were largely consistent with, and in some cases, complementary to the overall content of the posts, and the underlying messages they aimed to convey. Specifically, the visual representations in the ELT pages were purposefully designed to reflect the culture of the English-speaking community as a clear means of reinforcement.