Functional-notional Approach in Teaching Persian to Non-Iranian Language Learners

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.