Evaluation of Literary Texts Derived from Teaching Persian to non-Persian Books: An Integrated Approach

Literary texts can be used in language teaching/learning programs as a means of teaching the language. Moreover, potent language learners consider reading literature as a language-learning goal. In this regard, it is of utmost importance to design, develop, and re-evaluate language learning materials with regard to the literature. The present study was thus motivated to evaluate the literary texts in teaching Persian to non-Persian books in order to help the improvement of Persian teaching programs. To this end, an integrated approach was employed to investigate different aspects of the mentioned books in terms of language skills, cultural concepts, communicative functions, type and genre of the texts, type of homework, grammatical structures, and presentation of literary texts. The obtained results indicated that the perceptual-motor speaking skills were ignored in most cases. Moreover, most literary texts were indicative of intercultural aspects rather than cross-cultural or intercultural ones. In addition, most literary texts were not related to the the grammatical point raised in the unit, and the communication functions in literary texts were presented at a low level. Therefore, there were some weaknesses in the presentation of literary texts, especially communicative functions, perceptual motor speaking practices, and intracultural concepts. Moreover, all language skills were not equally presented in the investigated books.