Comparison of Vocabulary in the Textbooks of Teaching Persian to Non-Persian Speakers with Persian Basic Words

Language learning, in addition to the four skills of reading, writing, speaking, and listening, has two essential components: grammar and vocabulary. Given the short duration of language teaching to learners, they must choose the right content. Choosing the right words is one of the essential parts of preparing textbooks. One of the criteria for selecting appropriate words for teaching is choosing from the most widely used words in the language. In this way, the learner learns the most important words of the language faster and can approach their goal of communicating with the target community sooner. In the present study, we tried to assess the degree of adaptation of selected words in Persian textbooks to non-Persian languages to teach practical and basic Persian words. For this purpose, we compare the educational words of the four educational books First step, Mina, Vocabulary in Use, and Persian language at the elementary level with the high-frequency words of the Hamshahri, Frequency Dictionary, A Frequency Dictionary of Persian, and Advanced Learner's Persian Dictionary which are based on corpus study. It was found that the adaptation of the educational words of these books with the frequently used Persian words is between 5 to 26%, which is a small amount in total, and there is a need to modify the word teaching in these books and also review the list of frequently used Persian words.