چکیده:
Recent years have witnessed drastic enhancements in English language teaching (ELT) especially due to the Internet. Although the literature is well-documented with regard to the positive effects of Internet application in English education, the critical investigation of Internet-mediated ELT sources has rarely been dealt with. In this study, one of the four most favorite Internet-based English programs in Iran and throughout the world (Karimi Alavijeh, 2014), namely, the BBC Leaning English, was investigated in terms of the way it represented Iran. For this purpose, qualitative content analysis was used to extract the main themes of this program and an adapted version of Van Leeuwen’s (2008) Social Actor Network was utilized for the critical discourse analysis of the resulted corpus. The extracted themes, the recognized social actors, and the way different discursive mechanisms and hypertextual techniques had been used to represent them in unfavorable manners unfolded the presence of hidden agenda in a supposedly English learning program.
خلاصه ماشینی:
Keywords: hidden curriculum, adapted version of Van Leeuwen’s Scial Actor Network, Iran, BBC Learning English, Internet-enhanced English language teaching Introduction Enthusiasm for the use of the Internet in English education has highly increased in recent years due to its provision of unrivaled potentials and diverse facilities.
Taking this need into account, and keeping in mind the long history of Brit- ish global hegemony and the sensitive relations of Iran and Britain, especially during the past 40 years after the Iranian Islamic Revolution (Shoeibi, 2016), we found it quite relevant to explore if there are new relations of power in the pretext of British Broadcasting Channel (BBC), formed through ELT (hidden) curriculum.
, 2017; Kilickaya, 2004; Rahimi & Yadollahi, 2009; Rezaeifard & Chalak, 2017); failure of commercial English course books to attract learners because of their incongruity with their social values and language needs (Brown, 2001; Canagarajah, 1999; Dendrinos, 2001; Poursadouqi, 2012; Sadeghy, 2008); emphasis on the need for inclusion of learners’ local cultures (Chen et al.
The literature about the Internet-mediated language teaching is well- documented and vast with regard to its positive effects on language learning and teaching (Clyde & Delohery, 2004; Ducate & Lomicka, 2008; Fayyazi, 2007; Lee, 2008; Nami & Marandi, 2013; Richardson, 2006, Warschauer, 1996) online testing and assessment (Roever, 2007; Weber & Able, 2003; Wolf, 2001), online communication (Lamy & Hampel, 2007) intercultural communication (Far- shadnia, 2010; Kim & Bonk, 2002), interactive competence (Chun, 1994), cul- ture learning (Hofstede, 1991), promoting a social constructivist account of culture (Kim & Bonk, 2002), interlocutors’ interpretation of each other’s behav- iors on the Web (Frank et al.