Current research on EFL teacher agency has paid little attention to how teachers negotiate their agency and identities in interaction within the context of teaching and learning at practice level and broader EFL policies. EFL policies in Iran, aimed to serve Islamic ideologies, restrict the teaching of sociocultural aspects of English language (Borjian 2013), which fail to meet students’ learning needs in communicative competence. EFL instruction, including materials and curricula, in the highly centralized context of education in both public and private sectors caters challenges to Iranian EFL teachers agentive identities in balancing the gaps among their professional knowledge, student learning needs, and macro policies translated into institutional rules.
Drawing on the scholarship of language policies and teacher identity (Hamid & Nguyen, 2016), this study examined the dynamic nature of teacher identity construction among EFL instructors in Iran. It also looked at the impact of micro and macro level policies on the ever-changing teacher roles and power in relation to their institutions and students. Fairclough’s (2001) approach to language and power was used to closely analyze classroom interactions where Iranian EFL instructors demonstrated their agency to negotiate and legitimize teacher expertise, sociocultural expectations towards teaching and learning, and institutional ideologies. Teachers’ agentive identities were mediated by the practices at local level and institutional context and educational policies at broader level. Learners’ expectations and the rules imposed by the authorities led some teacher participants to challenge against their desirable teacher agentive identities. Teachers’ reference to a “typical Iranian context,” asking students to follow both the institutional and broader sociocultural expectations towards a typical Iranian student, complicated their desired and performed agentive identities in relation to language learners, institutions, and larger Iranian sociocultural contexts.
References
Borjian, M. (2013). English in Post-revolutionary Iran: From indigenization to internationalization. Bristol, England: Multilingual Matters.
Fairclough, N. (2001). Language and Power (2nd edition). Pearson Education Limited.
Hamid, M. & Nguyen, H. T. (2016). Globalization, English language policy, and teacher agency: Focus on Asia. International Education Journal: Comparative Perspective, 15(1), 26-44.
