Convergence of Prospects for a Multilingual Education Policy: When Thoughts Clash with Policy

The recent social turn that applied linguistics has taken defies monolingual ideologies and reorganizes multilingualism as the global standard. Accordingly, institutions are eager to encourage linguistic and cultural diversity inasmuch as several languages can be employed, contrary to neoliberalism, which promotes globalization with English, and neo-nationalism whose common thread is xenophobia. This study explores Iranian school officials and teaching professionals’ perceptions of adopting a multilingual education policy, which can accommodate more foreign languages other than English. Framed by interviews and drawing on experts’ opinions in the first phase, it then finds through a questionnaire survey that professionals and school authorities come up with similar ideas regarding the benefits that the language policy reform can bring about mainly for resisting English imperialism and taking account of personal preferences. Both groups also hold similar opinions on the requirements of the new language in education policy in that in-service education was reported as an urgent need. Professionals and school officials, however, perceived challenges to this proposed plan including inadequate staffing and pessimism, differently.