critical applied linguistics

The instability and interdisciplinarity of applied linguistics have led to the divergence of themes explored in research articles, resulting in many studies on applied linguistics research themes. However, there are still gaps, including selecting unrepresentative corpora and analyzing research articles published years ago. This diachronic corpus-based study attempted to randomly select 3000 original research articles published from 2012 to 2022 in 20 top-tier journals and analyze them using Glaser and Strauss’ (1967) grounded theory to ensure trustworthiness and rigor. The findings demonstrated that well-established areas within the field, such as Second Language Acquisition (SLA), Language Testing, and sociolinguistics, were predominant, whereas critical- and technological-oriented areas received limited attention. Novel interdisciplinary themes, such as neurolinguistics, also emerged. It was also found that each main theme included various sub-themes; for example, SLA embodied sub-themes such as Learner Identity and Learner Motivation, and these sub-themes themselves included sub-categories. The findings illuminate the need for educational policymakers to widen the scope of applied linguistics research. Likewise, in order to cater for the students’ needs and foster a more inclusive educational environment, teachers and materials developers need to incorporate a wide variety of diverse, critical, and neglected themes in their instructional resources, materials, and lesson plans.

This study aimed at investigating the Iranian EFL teachers’ perceptions of critical pedagogy values in teaching English with an emphasis on gender and teaching experience. For that end, a 33-item Likert-type questionnaire was developed. The researcher-made instrument was administered to 102 EFL teachers teaching English in language schools in Qom, Iran. The internal consistency of the instrument was calculated through using Cronbach Alpha. It showed a high reliability (α=.88). The data was subjected to non-parametric Mann Whitney U test to check any potential significant difference between the levels of CP perceptions in the male and female EFL teachers. The results revealed that there was not a significant difference between genders in all items except item1 (p=.021), item18 (p=.017), item19 (p=.008), item 20 (p=.004), item28 (p=.000) and item 31 (p=.03) since the p value for these items was less than .05 (Pallant, 2005). The Kruskal Wallis test was also run to investigate if there were any differences in CP perceptions across four levels of language teaching experience. The test statistics revealed no statistically significant difference in levels of CP perception across four groups of EFL teachers in all items except item 18 (p=.034), 19(p=.025), 31(p=.01) and 32(p=.027) which were significant since the p value for them was less than .05 (Pallant, 2005). Then, the results of the study are discussed and some implications are presented.

The decision by the Ministry of Higher Education in Iran to revise and update the subjects for the MA and PhD courses in TESOL should pave the way towards a more comprehensive understanding of teaching English to speakers of other languages. The Ministry’s revisions can be seen in line with the English language teacher’s awareness. Awareness of context in social sciences and humanities should have significant consequences for us in TESOL. One of the consequences, for instance, is our need for tracing the history of TESOL in Iran (or any area and country), and the building of an archive, without which TESOL in Iran maybe being trapped in the vicious circle of doing experiments that do not relate to our situation in a useful way. The Ministry’s new subjects should provide us with an invaluable opportunity to experience new horizons in researching TESOL. Scientific attitude we all have been brought up with has led to an epistemology that does not seem adequate in today’s world anymore. It is not adequate because it is reductionist in nature; it sees the social phenomena relating to one another solely on the basis of cause and effect relationship; it treats human beings as objects and it does not leave room for competing epistemologies. The new materials should be regarded as a platform to throw us into the unknown world of social world whose existence for us is a matter of interpretation rather than description. Science and critique in the sense we have learned and used them so far have turned into fixed standard curricula preventing us from experiencing an authentic life. All over the world, Englishes are learned by people wishing to communicate with one another for different reasons, and English teachers should see what they can do to help them in this regard.