The Representation of Persian Language Functions and Notions in LET'S LEARN PERSIAN and PERSIAN LANGUAGE Series

The notional-functional approach is one of the most influential theories in the field of foreign language teaching and almost all English, French, German, Italian, Spanish and even Arabic, Hebrew and Turkish language teaching resources, have considered the principles of this approach, in order to produce educational contents. The key principle of this approach is to create purposeful and communicative based balance between the language notions and functions and the real situations. Nevertheless, regretfully not much attention to this approach is paid in the authentic teaching Farsi to the foreigners’ resources. In this study, first the notional-functional approach and the foremost language notions and functions in the framework of this approach are presented. Then, the representation rate of these notions and functions in let’s learn Persian (Zolfaghari & Etal., 2002) and Persian language (Safarmoqadam, 2007) teaching series were evaluated. This evaluation have been made through a self-developed checklist. This checklist consists of 10 basic questions on the content of courses and 6 default responses: at all, very low, low, medium, high and very high with respectively 0, 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5 points assigned to each question. According to the results, the let’s learn Persian series gained 35 and the Persian language series gained 16 points out of 50. Although the overall result of this project suggests the superiority of the let’s learn Persian series, but the rate of language notions and functions diversity and distribution in both series, lead us to purposeful planning for teaching Farsi based on language notions and functions.