Ta‘arof in Persian Language and Culture: Situations,, Strategies and Linguistic Structures ( a guideline preparation for compiling TPFL Textbooks)

It is more than two decades that culture has been taught as the fifth skill for foreign language learners. Ta’arof is a communicative strategy that Persian learners need to use in their very initial interactions with Iranian society i.e. a lack of its command may cause miscommunication. A review of some of the most popular TPFL textbooks shows the need for a pedagogical and linguistic basis for teaching ta’arof. The present article is an attempt to provide such basis by portraying a relatively cohesive picture of ta’arof situations, functions and linguistic structures through investigating ta’arof in native-speakers’ daily conversations. In this research a corpus of ta’arof collected by Kalantari(1398) was explored on the basis of Koutlaki’s framework of politeness and ta’arof. The study distinguished nine situations of ta’arof i.e. conversation onset, reception, request and enquiry, gratitude, empathy and sympathy, appreciation and encouragement, donation and receiving gifts, states and actions, coming and going and conversation disclosure. Then the functions included in each situation and the linguistic structures used for expressing ta’arof were searched and listed The research took a preliminary step towards a grammar of ta’arof which could be used in compiling TPFL textbooks and facilitating ta’arof teaching and learning.