Glocalisation of MA in ELT Programmes in Iran

MA programmes in Teaching English as a Foreign Language in Iran are among the most popular postgraduate programmes in the country. This popularity is clearly due to the international value of English as a lingua franca. The number of students in these programmes has exponentially increased in the past two decades from around 50 in 1990 to more than 1200 in 2014 just in public universities. A similar pattern of growth for such programmes is also witnessed in the private sector. In line with what is happening in many other countries, this trend can be observed in other postgraduate programmes, indicating a 'massification' (Tight, 2004; Morely et al., 2002) in Higher Education (HE) in Iran. We argue that although the ‘massification’ in the Iranian HE is potentially influences by the challenges associated with globalization and the local responses to those challenges, it has characteristics that are specific to the local context of HE in Iran. In this paper, after drawing on previous studies in this area (Hasrati & Tavakoli, 2014) and presenting an overview of the impact of globalization on HE, we will provide data from a recent study investigating faculty views on the relationship between globalization and the changes to MA TEFL programmes in Iran. We will further discuss the extent to which the globalised context of HE has been influential in shaping MA TEFL programmes in Iran.