A Qualitative Study of Global Citizenship Education and ELFin Iran

The setting of a globalized world needs pedagogic thought and action, and requires anew comprehension of training that goes beyond the teaching of factual knowledge.The educational concept of global Citizenship education (GCE), which should be aninterdisciplinary consideration in all areas of education, centers on an increasinggrowth of complexity and development towards a global society. The main purposeof modern education is to enable individuals to understand these complexdevelopments and reflect critically on them mainly via English language as LinguaFranca (ELF). Accordingly, related parties all need to face ELF in the postmodernage. The focus of this qualitative study has been to investigate the globalizationprocess and role of ELF in GCE, as well as how the awareness of GCE goals is relatedto English language proficiency of individuals in Iran. To this end, ten PhD candidatesof IAU Tehran branches with high and low English language knowledge were selectedin a purposive sampling process. Twelve open ended questions were developed basedon the existing questionnaire on GCE by Morais and Ogden (۲۰۱۱) in semi-structuredinterview format. Thematic analysis was employed to analyze the interviewtranscripts. The findings indicate that English Language learning and the relatedcontents can play a significant role in raising awareness regarding global challengesin the world, and that participants showed high degree of interest in expressing theirviews on global issues, giving main role to social networks regarding actions they cantake, but unable to participate in global processes due to their financial status andgovernment policies.

کلیدواژه ها:

English as Lingua Franca (ELF) ، Global Citizenship (GC) ، Global CitizenshipEducation (GCE) ، Multiculturalism