The Problems of Teaching Ancient Iranian Languages (Avestan, Old Persian, and Sogdian)

Teaching ancient languages has an important difference from teaching modern languages. In contrast, the student of modern languages focus on four skills, speaking, listening, reading, and writing, the acquisition of an ancient language, more than anything, is based on text comprehension. That is why modern language teaching methods, like CLT, are not very useful for teaching ancient languages. Moreover, most ancient texts are not general texts, but there are literary, religious, or legal texts, and the student needs additional and information to comprehend the texts. In this paper, at first, we notice the problems of teaching ancient Iranian languages and then describe what can be called the “teaching method of Avestan, Old Persian, and Sogdian. At the end, we compare the available books for learning these languages. All of these books use the method, named “grammar-translation,” but the most useful ones have original texts besides the grammar explanations and pay more attention to read and to analyze of the texts.