Analysis and Assessment of Persian Language Textbooks for Teaching Non-Iranian learners based on Task-based Approach

Following the theories and achievements of language didactics and also with the emphasis on form and meaning, there are several approaches in a syllabus on its compiling methods, content selection and organizing the selected elements. Such approach that has focused on the semantic and communicative dimension rather than the grammatical one fundamentally and has attracted the attention of language educators, since the last decade of the previous century, is Task-based curriculum development. In teaching Persian language to non-Iranians, this approach has not been accomplished deeply in any field of studies or analytical ones. Owing to the importance of syllabus content in language teaching, this research, whilst introducing the task-oriented approach, examines the effectiveness of the tasks in the second and the third volume from the 7-volume textbook series, "Teaching the Persian Language in Persian", from the point of analyzing the implementation of principles for the Task-oriented approach. A questionnaire with subscales of the task definitions, task components, task framework, task difficulty, empirical basis for task-based language teaching which focus on form in task-based language teaching is used to explore the evaluation of the two mentioned volumes. The results deduced from the survey of these two volumes, among 40 Iranian instructors and 40 non-Iranian students from two high educational institutions, show that the implementation of Curriculum design principles based on task-orientated approach is average in those volumes, on both quantitative and qualitative scale and it is still far from a satisfactory level. The results of this study helps the educational syllabus designers to design and create curriculums for teaching Persian to non-Persian speakers more efficiently, as well the instructors to teach communicative competence in classrooms.