New Perspectives on Language and Education

This book unravels the story of English, the language of 'the enemies', in post-revolutionary Iran. Drawing on diverse qualitative and quantitative fieldwork data, it examines the nation's English at the two levels of policy and practice to determine the politics, causes, and agents of the two diverging trends of indigenization/localization and internationalization/Anglo-Americanization within Iran's English education. Situating English in the nation's broader social, political, economic, and historical contexts, the volume explores the intersection of the nation's English education with variables such as power, economy, policy, ideology, and information technology over the past three decades. The multidisciplinary insights of the book will be of value to scholars of global English, education policies and reforms and language policy as well as those who are specifically concerned with education in Iran.

Compared with STEM fields, foreign language (FL) education and second language acquisition have only slowly embraced open education and the new knowledge ecologies it produces. FL educators may have been hesitant to participate in the open education movement due to a lack of research which investigates the benefits and challenges of FL learning and teaching in open environments. This book contextualizes open education in FL learning and teaching via an historical overview of the movement, along with an in-depth exploration of how the open movement affects FL education beyond the classroom context, fills the research void by exploring aspects of open second language learning and teaching across a range of educational contexts, and illustrates new ways of creating, adapting and curating FL materials that are freely shared among FL educators and students.