Exploring the representation of processes in Persian language learning textbooks: A case study based on systemic functional linguistics

Teaching the “verb” is very important in learning the grammatical and semantic structure of any language. In Halliday’s functional grammar, verb is considered as “process” under the transitivity system. From the viewpoint of this system, verb has the ability to represent the experience in language; therefore, it is considered in the format of experiential metafunction. Process, event, being and not-being, feeling, and action are issues which appear in form of verb phrases. By considering the types and frequency of processes in educational texts, one can identify their approaches to the transfer of experiential concepts of the language and the diversification or non-diversification of processes and the educational outputs of these processes. The main purpose of this article was to explore the frequency of process types and investigate the embedding of those processes into educational approaches in three intermediate books titled “Let’s learn Persian”, “Modern instruction of Persian language”, and “Persian language”. Hence, the processes which appeared in the texts of these books and their types were specified in an analytical-statistical method. The results showed that in the three considered books, relational process has more frequency than the other processes. Since a wide range of sentences are made by relational process in the language, its significant frequency in elementary language teaching materials is educationally justified. However, the books considered in this paper related to the intermediate level. Furthermore, behavioral and material processes which represent most of the human’s life experiences are of average frequency in these books and for the learning and retention of these processes, the writers have resorted more to semantic variables such as partial or complete repetition, synonymy, collocation, and antonymy.