Investigating and Identification of Effective Methods and Approaches for Teaching General Language Persian to Speakers of Other Languages

Language teaching methods and approaches are considerably effective in teaching Persian language and culture. This study examined the teachers' perspectives toward the use of methods and approaches appropriate for teaching Persian to students learning Persian for general purposes. To this, the study recruited 43 teachers teaching the Persian language to non-Persian language learners at several Persian language centers across different universities. They were provided with a 22-item questionnaire probing the teachers' attitudes to the use of methods sub-categorized into five sections, namely, structural view, functional view, interactional view, proprietary methods, and other. The results showed that the participants generally favored 16 (out of 22) teaching methods and approchs among which "teacher-oriented and appropriate to class conditions," "communicative", "audio lingual", "task-based" and "natural approach" were ranked from the first to fifth positions respectively; in their perspectives, the principles of these five methods could be used for teaching Persian Language for general purposes. The results of the t-test showed that the methods of "teaching dogmatic language," "Pimsler," "Michael Thomas," and learning by teaching were not useful in designing and developing resources for teaching Persian language for general purposes. The results of this study might encourage the Persian language teachers to employ the most efficient methods in teaching Persian to the speakers of other languages.