Evaluating the Pedagogical Grammar in Teaching Persian Language Coursebooks

This paper evaluates pedagogical grammar in the coursebooks 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.