Consequences of Internationalization and Using Farsi as the Only Language of Instruction in Iran's Higher Education System: Content Analysis

As one of the challenges of higher education is internationalization, Iran tries to take the first steps in it, to have more interaction and communication with scholars and universities in the world. Since according to the article 15 of the Constitution of Islamic Republic of Iran, the official language and script of Iran, the lingua franca of its people, is Persian (Farsi) the current paper tried to find the consequences of internationalization and using Farsi as the only language of instruction in higher education of Iran. It is a qualitative descriptive study using qualitative content analysis of interviews with 24 scholars and key informants of higher education in Iran. The sampling method is purposive using a snowball sampling technique. Interviews continued to get saturation. Then contents of the interviews were analyzed using open coding and axial coding method to get categories. Finding showed there are positive and negative consequences of using Farsi as the language of instruction in Iran. The consequences are in 5 categories and 32 subcategories.