Podcast Capabilities for Teaching Persian Language to Non-Persian Speakers in IRIB World Service A Case study on DW and Pars Today Persian Teaching Programs

One of the missions of international media is to educate the national language of the country through media. They provide the listeners with the knowledge of their country’s culture, social affairs, history and policies. Therefore, language teaching through radio and TV has a long history. In our country, the use of media for teaching Persian language has been hampered for reasons and is somewhat inadequate indeed. This research has been carried out to explain the capacity of podcasts as a new media for teaching Persian language and provide the listeners with a model for producing and distributing educational podcasts for radio as well as identifying the strengths and weaknesses of produced podcasts. According to Stephen Krashen’ s theory i.e. ‘ Input Hypothesis’ , hearing is one of the main inputs of language acquisition and podcasts as a listening media provide the learners with the opportunity to practice, learn and enhance their listening comprehension. The present study has been conducted using library method and qualitative content analysis; the statistical population of this study were the learners of Persian language through podcasts transmitted by Pars Today and Deutsche Welle Persian language courses for a six-month term.