قاسم قنبری خانقاه

Foreign relations, at all levels, whether formal, state or personal relations, require familiarity with foreign languages. With the increase in need for establishing foreign relations at all levels in the contemporary Iranian history, the issue of educating and learning foreign languages got new aspects. In the early 19th century, the Iranian defeats in two wars against Russia made them aware of their lag behind the new science and technology train, and the Iranians decided to learn the new sciences. And in this regard, familiarity with foreign languages was of paramount importance. Various factors led to the French language becoming the primary among the foreign languages in the 1st period of this movement (from the 19th centrury to the 2nd world war), and during the next period (until the end of the 2nd Pahlavi reign), English became the first foreign language. In this paper, this issue is probed first from the historical aspect, and the historical evidence and clues relating to the change and development  of foreign languages in Iran is looked into. Then, using the "Linguistic Imperialism" theory by Robert Phillipson, it is examined how this change, while being influenced by domestic conditions and policy making of the Iranian governments, has been influenced by a global trend and the English language emerging as an international language. In other words, Iranian situation has not been contrary to the international trend, and the emerging of the English language in Iran as the first foreign language, must be seen as influenced by the globalization policies.

One of the ways of disseminating liberal feminism is utilization of English language teaching through which English culture is spread among language learners. In order to find out the indicators of liberal feminism in English language teaching resources, the researchers, first, identified its dimensions and components following a cultural approach. Then, the three mostly used English language resources in Iran were selected and the contents of the parts containing clear indicators of liberal feminism were analyzed. The analyses were carried out on the basis of the components of liberal feminism and the common Islamic, Iranian culture. These analyses were presented to twenty experts to be confirmed. Then, the content analyses were revised and the final results were achieved. The results indicated that the two dimensions of equality (35.5 percent) and capability (30.5 percent) were the most frequent in the resources. Freedom (17.5 percent) and legal protection (13.5 percent) took up the third and fourth places in the table. Other dimensions had a frequency of less than 5 percent and were negligible.