INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF HUMANITIES (THE JOURNAL OF HUMANITIES)
Year:2002 | Volume:9 | Issue:2|Papers Count:4

Two fundamental insights underlie most recent researches on language development. The first is the realization that the child does not merely speak a garbled version of the adult language around him. Rather, he speaks his own language with its own characteristic patterns. Thus, it is quite appropriate to study a child as the speaker of a specific language to describe its structure by means of a "grammar". The second insight is that the child himself must act as a linguist: he/she is faced with a finite set of utterances from which he must extract the underlying rules in the remainder of his/her life. As far as the universal aspects of language are concerned, many languages must be examined all over the world, and as far as I have investigated, no systematic major study has so far been done on the acquisition of Persian. This point is supported, by the personal report obtained from Julia S. Falk (Michigan State University) who writes: "I know of no major studies on children"s acquisition of this (i.e., Persian) language, and therefore your study could provide an important contribution to knowledge ...". The subject of the study was the language performance of the author"s own child. This study took a long time to collect the required data of her daily productions. The main concern was the subject"s cognitive development to see: 1. At what stages she relates sounds to meaning. 2. Her phonomorphosyntactic and cognitive development. 3. The traces of language universals in the acquisition of Persian language compared with the facts about the universals in other languages. A careful study, that is, the precise observation, taking notes on the subject"s behaviour, and tape-recording, started when she was only seven months old and went on till she became 34 months old. For 27 months, over 700 notes were written on her productions. All sounds and sound combinations which she produced were related to certain meaningful actions: they were also recorded in four cassettes to make further checks possible. They helped me control the written notes in order to provide a more accurate phonetic transcription. Her 27-month productions have been divided up into five different stages. Each stage has clearly pictured the developmental processes of the Persian language; that is, phonomorphosyntactic and cognitive development. Each stage is provided with its related tables. Appendices A and A Cont. present the "Final -Table" introducing the subject"s phonological development from 7 to 34 months of age. Appendix "B" introduces the outline of these stages.

In this paper, I present a unified syntactic aualysis of the main verb xast-an "want" in its three distinct uses in Persian. This unified analysis observes economy in derivation, computation as well as in the lexicon by proposing that xast-an takes three different types of complements in syntax, i.e., NP, CP, VP. The three types of complements indicate three stages of grammaticization of this verb in a unidirectional universal path from more concrete to more abstract meaning. I argue that xast-an in all its three uses is a modal type main verb and not an auxiliary in Persian.

The Qur"an manuscripts played a dominant role in Islamic art. Our knowledge of the Islamic book in the early centuries of the Islamic era is based entirely on Qur"anic material. There are no finely illuminated Islamic manuscripts from 10th AD century Iran other than copies of the Qur"an; in fact, there are no other manuscripts at all. As to the period covered in this article, it has been found that the late 10th century was the formative period for Qur"an manuscripts. From the 11th to mid-13th centuries, the classical age when Qur"an manuscripts were perfected, we find a limitless variety of themes. The artists of these periods formulated a decorative vocabulary that became the most prominent characteristic of Islamic works of Qur"an and was used with minor modifications up to the 20th century. The classical age of Qur"an manuscripts, however, was brought to an end by the Mongol invasions in the middle of the 13th century. The arts of the Qur"an have been classified as: calligraphy, illumination, and bookbinding.

In recent decades, the methodologies and practices of communicative language teaching (CLT) have been dominant in the context of English as a second language all over the world. Some countries in which English is taught as a foreign language have also adopted CLT in their educational systems. Despite enormous efforts made to implement CLT into their English classrooms, research studies indicate that there are severe limitations on the way of importing CLT in foreign language environments. The purpose of this paper is to question whether CLT can be adopted in the Iranian educational setting. To provide a structure to this paper, the writer will deal with the barriers on the way of implementing the CLT approach in the Iranian high school context under the broad category of milieu, and within this framework, the context of teaching English in Iranian educational system, learning strategies of Iranian students, the very nature of the context of English as a foreign language, as well as the washback effect of the University Entrance Examination on the teaching/learning of English will be touched upon. Furthermore, throughout this paper, references are made to the concept that any curricular change should be sensitive to cultural values and pedagogical beliefs, or it may negatively affect the learning process.