Delving into Conception of Community of the Immigration: The Association Between Imagined Communities and Learner Engagement in Writing Tasks

The concept of imagined communities has been overlooked by researchers in second language acquisition in the Iranian context. Actually, imagined communities can establish a policy framework for the consideration of desire, hope, and creativity in identity construction in English as a foreign language (EFL) settings. The present study, following a mixed-methods design, mainly aimed at: (1) examining the association between the students’ imagined communities and engagement in writing tasks and (2) exploring the students’ perspectives of the role of imagined communities in elevating their engagement to learn English. In doing so, a number of 112 homogeneous English-major students participated in the quantitative phase of the study based on convenient sampling, and a pool of six students were participated in the qualitative phase of the study based on purposive sampling. A number of instruments were used to measure the imagined community and engagement in writing tasks. The results of Pearson product-moment correlation showed that there was a large positive association between imagined communities and engagement in writing tasks. Having measured the intercoder reliability and intercoder agreement, the results emerged from the content analysis of the students’ responses revealed 12 common codes. Finally, the study offers some practical implications for EFL students and teachers.