Developing a General Service Wordlist for Persian Language: An Integrated Approach

Persian language learners invest a proportion of their time on acquiring Persian vocabulary. To afford a high investment return to these learners, the curriculum should include high frequency words drawn from a Persian general service wordlist. To develop a general service wordlist for Persian, we need to adopt a definition for the term "word" in accord with the mental lexicon of average Persian speaker. This definition will help us in identifying different tokens of a word type. We also need to consider the text coverage and the range of the basic vocabulary in the source corpus and other corpora. In this study, we adopted a modified version of the word family concept to identify different tokens of word types and utilized it in estimating the test coverage and the range of the words of Bijankhan and Mohseni's (1391) Persian word frequency list. The corpus included 34000 words. The results demonstrated that a modified version of Bijankhan and Mohseni’s (1391) word frequency list affords 84 percent coverage of our corpus and its words enjoy satisfactory range. It was concluded that by implementing some modifications to Bijankhan and Mohseni’s (1391) list, a Persian general service wordlist could be developed. This general service wordlist could be used in setting curricular goals and in defining learner mastery levels and language difficulty levels. This instrument could facilitate the development of Persian vocabulary tests and proficiency tests. It will also be of help in identifying Persian academic and technical vocabulary.