Despite all the attempts to convince teachers and school authorities to support critical thinking (CT) skills in school settings, the application of CT skills has not reached a satisfactory point. Using a quasi-experimental design, the present study attempted to examine the effect of critiquing journal articles on English major students'…

This collective article discusses the philosophy of modern higher education in Iran, which in this case, optimistically, its history dates back to the founding of "Dar al-fonun" (1851)--if we consider "Dar al-fonun" as a university. Otherwise, its origin can be traced back to the University of Tehran (established in 1934).…

Though the emergence of standardized testing promoted classical approaches such as summative achievement tests, it brought about serious criticisms regarding the stakes of these tests and their consequences on different dimensions of education. Exploring these consequences attracted researchers' attention in education. A mass of studies are…

In the past decades, neoliberalism has permeated (foreign) language education, as has been discussed by critical research in the fields of: curriculum theory, applied linguistics, discourse analysis, language policy, language assessment, to name a few. Despite the fact that research on foreign language education and neoliberalism is certainly…

Educational philosophy has not discussed Foucault's publications on the Iranian Revolution and the related controversy. Foucauldian concepts are applied to education, though his only writings which "sidetracked" him from exploring power within the state, namely, his journalistic accounts of his visits to Iran, remain unexplored in our…

Ferdowsi's Shahnameh and Homer's Iliad are among the first literary masterpieces of Iran and Greece. These teachings include the educational teachings of Zal and Roudabeh, and Paris and Helen. This paper presents a comparative look at the immortal effect of this Iranian poet with Homer's poem--the Greek blind poet. In this comparison, using a…

Goldmann's genetic structuralism approach is one of the literary critique approaches and believes that the literary text are derived from the ideology governing the classes of society, and focuses on study of stories and their structures to know the social structures. A review of the changes made in the themes and subjects of the works of the…

The present study seeks to critically review the state of the blended learning researches in the Iranian context. For this critique, 47 papers about blended learning were found in a number of indexing databases and their contents were analyzed. The contents mainly revolved around use of relevant terminology, features of blended learning,…

Supervision in Iranian private language schools is carried out by one experienced teacher supervisor with too much authority. This paper reports a novel model of supervision, namely rotatory peer-supervision, in which supervision is delegated to English as foreign language (EFL) teachers themselves. In rotatory supervision, experienced teachers…

This study investigates the impact of cultural and politico-religious dominance on the practice of critical reading (CR) of texts by a group of Iranian postgraduate students in Australia. Four postgraduate students were interviewed individually four times (each time for reading one text) for critical understanding of two pairs of Persian texts,…

In order to gain a deeper insight into second/foreign language (L2) classroom discourse, teacher talk, as one of the most important aspects of this discourse, needs to be studied from different perspectives. So, the purpose of the present study is to address the association between teachers' experience and different types of semantic schemata in…

Gholam Hussein Sa'edi is one of the greatest Iranian writers of short stories in the present era. Sa'edi's stories are based on the existence of fanciful and dreamlike settings in which he attempts to establish the endings of the stories to be the direct result of the characters' psychological reaction against their dreams. The linguistic and…

The present qualitative study sought to explore the relationship between English language learning and identity reconstruction from the viewpoints of Iranian language learners. The data were collected by means of focus-group interviews with forty-five male intermediate learners of English as a foreign language (EFL). To define the concept of…

In the field of English Language Teaching (ELT), attention has been shifted toward the alternative role of teachers as transformative intellectuals whereby transformation in teaching occurs from control and technical operations to criticism and intellectual reflection. This role enables teachers to focus on marginalized students' lived experiences…