Hidden Curriculum in Internet-Enhanced English Education: the Representation of Iranian Social Actors in BBC Learning English Program

Recent years have witnessed drastic enhancements in English language teaching (ELT) especially due to the Internet. Although the literature is well-documented with regard to the positive effects of Internet application in English education, the critical investigation of Internet-mediated ELT sources has rarely been dealt with. In this study, one of the four most favorite Internet-based English programs in Iran and throughout the world (Karimi Alavijeh, 2014), namely, the BBC Leaning English, was investigated in terms of the way it represented Iran. For this purpose, qualitative content analysis was used to extract the main themes of this program and an adapted version of Van Leeuwen’s (2008) Social Actor Network was utilized for the critical discourse analysis of the resulted corpus. The extracted themes, the recognized social actors, and the way different discursive mechanisms and hypertextual techniques had been used to represent them in unfavorable manners unfolded the presence of hidden agenda in a supposedly English learning program.