Exploring the Frequency of Tenses in Written and Spoken Farsi: Seeking the Priority in Teaching Farsi Grammar

Teaching the tenses is considered to be one of the most controversial challenges among teachers and researchers in teaching Farsi to non-Farsi speakers’ field. Prioritizing the tenses in accordance with their frequency could greatly facilitate the process of learning in language learners. In this certain research a comparison has been made between the frequency of the tenses in spoken and written Farsi. To do so, the Teaching Farsi Language and Literature Faculty of Al-Mustafa Open University has examined a number of Farsi papers and movies to explore the frequency of tenses in Farsi. After extracting and counting the tenses, the result has been classified in three groups of: High frequency, Middle-frequency and Low-frequency tenses. The results indicate that in spoken corpus the frequency of tenses is in the following order: “Hal-e-Eltezami, Gozashte-ye-Sade, and Amr” and in written corpus the frequency in the order is: “Gozashte-ye-Sade, Hal-e-Eltezami, Hal-e-Ekhbari, “Ast” Verb, and Gozashte-ye-Naghli”. The findings can lead the syllabus designers in prioritizing the educational materials according to their daily usages.