The quality of education is a predictor of a country's economic performance -- which is why comparative international education surveys are important. South Africa performed poorly in the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) in 2019. The score of 374 for mathematics and 324 for science is poor compared to the mid-point of…

Despite a rich tradition of investigating how 'Oriental' and Middle Eastern colonized others are represented in Western and Eurocentric media, policy papers, curriculum and popular culture, an important issue that has not been adequately explored by scholars of Iranian studies is how Iranian curricula writers have constructed images of Western and…

With the increasing attempts to use gender-fair language, different studies have investigated this issue from different viewpoints. To find an epicene pronoun used as a third-person singular, some research has been conducted investigating them in various contexts, yet few studies have focused on cultural differences. Since how to use language…

The researcher analyzed the Result and Discussion Sections of 10 dissertations of Iranian PhD students and 10 British PhD students by aiming to investigate their use of politeness strategies using Brown and Levinson's (1987) taxonomy and its relationship with the gender of the authors. The results proved that Iranian writers most frequently used…

This study tended to investigate the effect of culture, as depicted in language, on the use of stance in the applied linguistics research articles of two groups: native speakers of Persian, and native speakers of English. The two corpora comprising the discussion sections of forty research articles from reliable journals were compared for amounts…

This paper reports on a study that was carried out to describe and compare the apology strategies utilized by Iranian EFL and Malaysian ESL learners in confronting identical apology situations. For this purpose, data were elicited from 15 Iranian and 15 Malaysian students through a "Discourse completion tasks" questionnaire. The…

This study investigates the comprehension of indirect request speech act used by Iranian people in daily communication. The study is an attempt to find out whether different cultural backgrounds and the gender of the speakers affect the comprehension of the indirect request of speech act. The sample includes thirty males and females in Gachsaran…

This article presents the reports from the international research correspondents (IRCs) on the topic of second-language issues and multiculturalism through an informal polling using a questionnaire in six countries. The participating IRCs include: (1) Marta Infante of Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Chile, Chile; (2) Anita Poon of Hong Kong…