Capturing Student Voice on TEFL Syllabus Design: Agenticity of Pedagogical Dialogue Negotiation

Over the last decades, attempts at empowering student voice have captured, cross-culturally, the attention of educators as a means for improving educational landscapes. Hence, students have been repositioned as invaluable resources in schooling, research, and reform movements. To this aim, this study is to capture how the Iranian MA TEFL students' voice is realized regarding syllabus development. The data was collected through an open-ended questionnaire responded by 47 students majoring at eight state universities. The results of running a thematic content analysis showed that the constructs of student voice, i.e., students' interests, background knowledge, culture, styles, and gender, have become tokenistic and simplistic in practice. Students were treated as marginalized agents with no determining role in syllabus designing, while the instructors' voice acted as the sole leading factor. This study suggests that it is possible to envisage a situation wherein "student voice" is projected into syllabus development. It underscores that Iranian instructors should set the ongoing process of syllabus development open to modifications inspired by students' voice. In view of the findings, it is also discussed that student voice constructs refer to a more wide range of practices including "needs analysis," "students as decision makers," and "reciprocal humanistic appreciation." Finally, the study provides the educators as well as TEFL instructors with some implications both on how to be more cognizant of the challenges of student voice and how to project that awareness into syllabus development so as to reform the educational structures and build new spaces for exercising educational democracy.