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Choosing which additional language to include in national curricula and when to begin teaching it are important educational policy decisions. The current study aims to provide a contextually embedded picture of such policymaking process in the Iranian context. More specifically, the study is intended to explain the agency mechanism of different actors involved in the choice of foreign languages and its start age. Data come from official documents, interviews with key officials in Iran’s Ministry of Education, a questionnaire and textual and on-line archival data. Data analyses revealed that despite official acknowledgement of diversity in foreign language education couched in a monopoly/antitrust discourse to manage English spread and attempts to delay its learning, Iranian (in)visible planners choose English exclusively and formulate their own policies to begin learning it much earlier. I argue that foreign language policymaking in Iran is torn between the religious and state officials’ English demotion rhetoric rooted in post-Revolutionary de-Westoxication and anti-imperialism ideology and the need of the state for defused English to meet its neoliberal globalization goals on the one hand, and the growing obsession of policy arbiters with English viewed by officials as soft power asset of the West, on the other. I also suggest that to understand Iran’s foreign language policymaking one needs to consider both the long-strained Iran-America relations as well as the unique authority and power mechanism of people-with-power actor conferred to him by Shia-Islam system of governance and how/why his directives, statements, orientations and speech carry significant implications to foreign language policymaking process in all key state organizations and entities including the Ministry of Education.
