Zia Tajeddin
Abstract
Learning tenses is one of the problems encountered by the learners of Persian. To address the problem, teaching tenses through various tasks was considered in this study. To this end, the study focused on structural and communicative tasks for teaching Persian tenses. Participants were intermediate ...
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Learning tenses is one of the problems encountered by the learners of Persian. To address the problem, teaching tenses through various tasks was considered in this study. To this end, the study focused on structural and communicative tasks for teaching Persian tenses. Participants were intermediate learners studying Persian at DehkhodaInternationalCenter for the Teaching of Persian. Each group consisted of 40 non-Iranian learners, divided into structural and communicative groups. Both groups were homogeneous based on a Persian tense pretest. The structural and communicative groups were taught Persian tenses in terms of the principles of structural and communicative syllabuses, respectively. T-tests were employed to analyze the two groups’ pretest and posttest performance and to compare their posttest scores. Results showed the communicative group’s significant gains in recognizing and producing Persian tenses. By contrast, no significant difference was found between the pretest and posttest scores of the structural group. Moreover, the communicative group outperformed the structural group in the posttest. These findings imply that the communative task is more effective that the structural task and hence can be used in designing lessons for the teaching of Persian tenses in Persian language centers.
