Metacultural competence and ELT curriculum: The case of Iranian undergraduate ELT program

The present study aims at exploring the representation of metacultural competence (MC)—a competence that allows negotiation of cultural conceptualizations—in the documents designed at policy and planning stages of ELT curriculum development in Iran. For the policy stage, due to lack of an overt foreign language education policy document, seven major policy documents of Iran (namely, 20-year National Vision, Comprehensive Science Roadmap, Support for Comprehensive Science Roadmap in the Domain of Languages, Cultural Engineering Document, National Curriculum, Fundamental Reform in Education, and Islamicization of Universities) were selected. For the planning stage, Iranian ELT curricula for undergraduate students were chosen. Content analysis of the selected documents revealed that the analyzed documents did not represent MC in detail and mostly attended to the ‘cultural variation awareness’ component and the ‘acknowledge’ and ‘anticipate’ principles, which were limited to negotiating Islamic ideology and disregarded Iranian cultural conceptualizations.