A Contextualized Cultural-Communicative Framework for Iran’s Upper-Secondary English Teaching

This study proposes a contextualized framework for designing culturally responsive English language instruction in Iran’s upper-secondary schools. It addresses the problem that cultural information in English textbooks does not necessarily create opportunities for meaningful intercultural communication. The framework brings together principles from Communicative Language Teaching, Task-Based Language Teaching, Intercultural Communicative Competence, intercultural sensitivity, and Mediation. Its central assumption is that cultural content becomes more educationally meaningful when it is used as a resource for purposeful language use, comparison, interpretation, and decision-making. The study follows a qualitative, conceptual framework-development approach informed by theoretical literature and research on the Iranian context and the Vision series. The resulting framework links cultural resources to communicative gaps, interaction, interpretation and Mediation, Verbal Output, and communicative or Non-linguistic Outcomes. It also proposes an exploratory Intercultural Balance Index (IB) as a screening heuristic for reviewing the distribution of local and global cultural opportunities. The IB is not presented as a validated assessment measure. The framework offers a practical basis for task design, while its classroom effectiveness remains open to future empirical validation.

کلیدواژه ها:

English language teaching ، Task-Based Language Teaching (TBLT) ، Intercultural Communicative Competence (ICC) ، cultural identity ، Vision