An Investigation of Iranian Students’ English Proficiency Test Scores in Relation to some Selected Sociolinguistic Variables

Since the first day of language teaching in history, the main objective of language educators has been improving the target language competency among their students. However, achieving identical learning outcomes among language learners is almost impossible. No matter what teaching methodology and what teaching materials are used, the learning outcomes of students differ from each other. Considering this fact in mind, the researcher has tried to find whether socio-economic variables play any role in the learning outcome differences. Meantime, since the education system of Iran is highly centralized, it is a unique context to deliver this study. However, there is another fact valid for the Islamic Republic of Iran’s Educational System that makes Iran a unique context. After four decades of anti-intrusion policies of the Islamic Republic of Iran (IRI) against the English language, the researcher has also tried to evaluate their success rates and to study the status of this language in Iran. This study has thus investigated the status of the English language in Iran on two levels: one concerning the state’s policies and another, the people’s attitudes. To do so, we carried out research on the content of education documents of the Islamic Republic of Iran and the English language teaching textbooks employed in the education system. To locate the society’s stance on the English language, we administered a survey study on 472 participants randomly sampled from undergraduate students from four state universities. We concluded that there is an evident gap between the approach of the Islamic government and the people’s approach toward the English language in the current Iranian society. In relation to the socio-economic variables, this study concluded that the attitudinal stances of Iranian EFL students towards learning English were more instrumentally oriented. However, their attitudes were more limited to affect level; they did not show that they were putting sufficient effort and desire to practice English out of classroom context. Accordingly, their generally low level of English competency can be explained. The next conclusion was that family background plays an active role in determining the success or failure of language learning attempts. The father’s occupation and the number of siblings were significantly interlaced related to the English competency level of participants. Age is another important factor in determining the English competency of Iranian EFL learners while the gender of the students does play an active role in their English competency earning, it needs to be highlighted that this is not valid in all geographical locations touched by this study. Geographical Location plays a very important role in determining success or failure among Iranian EFL learners. Finally, it should be underlined that ‘location’ and ‘culture’ have shown to be interrelated. Therefore, it can be concluded that culture is also an important factor. Keywords: Sociolinguistic Variables, Geographical Location, Age, Gender, Socioeconomic Status, Attitudes, Educational Policy