Revisiting the Approach of National Curriculum towards Foreign Language Education

Acknowledging the strengths of the national curriculum, the present study aimed at evaluating its approach towards foreign language education from three perspectives: (1) analyzing the foreign language section of the national curriculum based on the methodological and theoretical underpinnings, and its internal consistency; (2) examining its content based on the basic assumptions mentioned in the literature for setting foreign language policies and (3) evaluating its content based on the macro-documents of the country. In so doing, first, the relevant sections of the national curriculum were analyzed. The results indicated that, although the foreign language section of the national curriculum has some strengths such as a move toward decentralization and increase in hours of instruction, it suffers from some weaknesses such as vagueness of the content and lack of consistency and connection among the aims of the instruction. In order to examine the document from the second perspective, 6 criteria that foreign language education policies should follow were extracted from the relevant literature, and the document was evaluated based on these criteria. The results indicated both consistencies and inconsistencies between the content of the document with these principles. The national curriculum, then, was evaluated to find its matches and mismatches with the policies and orientations of macro-documents. The results indicated that the foreign language section of the national curriculum cannot set the ground for achieving the goals proposed in the macro-documents of the country. Finally, the paper offers some guidelines for developing national English language curriculum.