JOURNAL OF PERSIAN LANGUAGE TEACHING TO NON-PERSIAN SPEAKERS
Year:2015 | Volume:3 | Issue:3 (8)|Papers Count:8

From thousands of years ago, with the increase in the number of immigrants for finding new lands and then for trading, learning other languages became inevitable. From second half of the twentieth century, the ever increasing need for getting into communication with others, development in technological growth, as well as the change of the world into a small village, led to the introduction of language didactics as an interdisciplinary field of study by using the achievements of other fields of studies such as psychology, sociology, methodology, linguistics etc. Then, in order to make the methods, strategies, and techniques of second and foreign language teaching and learning more scientific and practical (based on learners‟ needs), many researches in each branch and subbranches of language didactics were done.Unfortunately, language didactics has not been developed appropriately in the field of Persian language. Therefore, it is necessary that new thoughts and ideas to be applied gradually in methods of teaching Persian language, pedagogical material development, multilingual classes management, testing and so forth. To reach a dynamic Persian language didactics, we should take courses of action. For example, we should conduct B.A and Ph.D. courses in this field of study. Surprisingly, there are different courses for teaching English and French languages in every level of education in our country. However, the situation is not the same for Persian language at least in B.A and Ph.D. levels. Undoubtedly, conducting Persian language didactics courses will open a new route in this field of study to achieve the goals in teaching Persian language faster and more practically and scientifically.

Persian language learners invest a proportion of their time on acquiring Persian vocabulary. To afford a high investment return to these learners, the curriculum should include high frequency words drawn from a Persian general service wordlist. To develop a general service wordlist for Persian, we need to adopt a definition for the term "word" in accord with the mental lexicon of average Persian speaker. This definition will help us in identifying different tokens of a word type. We also need to consider the text coverage and the range of the basic vocabulary in the source corpus and other corpora. In this study, we adopted a modified version of the word family concept to identify different tokens of word types and utilized it in estimating the test coverage and the range of the words of Bijankhan and Mohseni's (1391) Persian word frequency list. The corpus included 34000 words. The results demonstrated that a modified version of Bijankhan and Mohseni’s (1391) word frequency list affords 84 percent coverage of our corpus and its words enjoy satisfactory range. It was concluded that by implementing some modifications to Bijankhan and Mohseni’s (1391) list, a Persian general service wordlist could be developed. This general service wordlist could be used in setting curricular goals and in defining learner mastery levels and language difficulty levels. This instrument could facilitate the development of Persian vocabulary tests and proficiency tests. It will also be of help in identifying Persian academic and technical vocabulary.

The present study examined the errors of Persian native speakers in rating the essays of Persian language learners in the framework of a many-facet Rasch measurement model. To do so, Persian native speakers were requested to rate 56 writings of 28 male and female Persian language learners in advanced level. The applicants, studying in Humanities and Engineering fields, were learning Persian as a second language in Persian Language Center at Imam Khomeini International University in winter 2014. The raters rated the learners‟ writings using a researcher-made based on 5-point analytic rating scale. The collected data were analyzed using Facets software. The results of Facets analyses indicated that raters showed more bias toward both topics in writings. The results also, revealed that raters were more biased toward coherence. Findings represented significant differences in raters‟ bias towards learners‟ writings. The findings would shed light on raters training to reduce the errors they may commit.

Learning language functions and the way they are implemented are the most significant objectives in foreign/second language teaching. Since few studies have been conducted to identify and recognize the Persian language functions and notions, the present study aims to identify the unmarked language forms, which are used in various situations of the five most common Persian language functions, and utilize them in teaching Persian to non-Iranian language learners. Accordingly, after collecting the required data from the conversations of Persian speakers and running a reliability test on 60 Persian speakers (30 female and 30 male), the unmarked forms of the five language functions (greeting, introducing people, accepting the invitation, disagreeing, and promising) were obtained. Merging the different situations based on the age, social status, and intimacy of the participants involved in the designed conversations, six Persian lessons were developed in the form of dialogues to be taught in a course. The participants of the course were all female and non-Persian students of Allame Tabatabaei university in Tehran. After taking a pre-test and ensuring the homogeneity of the participants in the experimental and the control group, the experimental group received the designed lessons during three sessions. At the end, to analyze the data, chi-square tests, Friedman tests, and analysis of covariance (ANCOVA) were employed. Results showed the positive effect of functional-notional syllabus on teaching Persian to non-Iranian language learners.

Taking into account the importance of religion as an important part of the Iranian culture as well as Persian learners‟ tendency towards religious studies, the present research aims to examine the extent to which religion is represented in selected textbooks of teaching Persian language to other languages speakers. Those textbooks included "Teaching Persian" in Al-Mustafa university (Vol. 7), "Teaching Persin" in Al-Zahra university (vol. 6), AZFA (Vol. 4), and the "History of Iranian Culture and Civilization" written by Saffar Moghaddam (Vol. 4). The religious discourses of selected samples were classified in three semantic fields of "Islamic" "other religions" and "neutral" discourses. Subsequently, the representation of each discourse was examined based on Halliday’s Systemic Functional Grammar (SFG). The findings showed that Islamic religious discourse was dominant in Al-Mustafa and Al-Zahra books, while the other religions discourse was dominant in AZFA; however, the equality of three semantic fields in Saffar Moghaddam’s book was reported. The representation of Islamic discourse through material process indicated that Islam has been portrayed as a practical part of the Iranian lifestyle. The relational process was dominant in the neutral and other religions discourses which indicate attempts to introduce other religions to Persian language learners. The Islamic discourse in Al-Mustafa and Al-Zahra books was identical in terms of the frequency, order, and distribution of processes. The Islamic discourse in AZFA and Saffar Moghaddam textbooks shows the Iranians position in Islam and the crucial role they played in Islam’s progress.

This paper evaluates pedagogical grammar in the course books of teaching Persian non-Iranian language learners. The study is based on communicative approach and pedagogical grammar. To evaluate the contents of those books, several checklists and grading scales were investigated and finally, an integrated checklist consisted of 20 questions was provided to be used in this study. In providing this checklist, evaluating indexes of content, language, method, structure of pedagogical grammar were considered. The results of investigating the pedagogical part of the books showed that applying the formalistic approaches and structural simplicity, which is both the features of pedagogical grammar, is their merit. Also, findings revealed that there are some weaknesses in these books: Teaching the spoken and written language simultaneously in elementary levels, lack of communicative strategies, lack of task-based grammar teaching, lack of real and meaningful language in exercises, mechanical and non-flexible way for teaching grammar, and not considering the selective nature of pedagogical grammar. Ultimately, with regard to the results of this survey, some recommendations to reform such textbooks in the field of pedagogical grammar are presented.

Today, teaching language through the use of technology has become considerably widespread in many countries. The present research aims to investigate the extent to which computer software and new technologies are employed in teaching Persian language. In addition, it studies the reasons for success or failure of these tools. The study, which was conducted in a comparative framework, used a researcher-made questionnaire to collect the data. Investigating the current status of Persian language learners of Imam Khomeini International university and Dehkhoda institute under three main fields of interest/motivation, knowledge (familiarity), and facilities, the results revealed that most students are interested in learning Persian language through technology and computer, but lack of facilities as well as non-mastered teachers in using computers were reported as the destructive factors in learners‟ motivation in both pre-mentioned Persian language teaching centers. Finally, some suggestions were given for enhancing the application of technology tools in Persian language centers for teaching this language.