Teaching Grammatical Aspect to non-Iranian Persian Learners: A Comparison of Structural and Communicative Methods

As one of the main topics in Persian verbal phrases, grammatical aspect has been largely ignored in teaching Persian to speakers of other languages. To address the topic, this study investigated the learning of Persian grammatical aspect through two teaching structural and communicative. Test takers were selected from the non-Iranian intermediate learners of Persian. Each group consisted of 40 foreign students. Both groups were administered an aspect test as a pretest to make sure about their homogeneity before treatment. Afterwards, grammatical aspect in Persian was taught to one group through the structural method, and through communicative materials developed by the authors to the other group. Each group’s progress was measured through the same aspect test after the completion of treatment. Paired-samples t-test results analysis showed that the communicative group, compared to the structural group, made significant improvement in learning Persian aspect. Furthermore, independent-samples t-test results revealed that the communicative group performed considerably better than the structural group in the post-test. These findings indicate that communicative language teaching is an effective method, which can be used to improve the teaching of Persian grammar to foreign students.