Online Teaching of Prepositions of Persian Language to Non-Persian Speakers Using Cognitive Approach and Animation tools: Analyzing the Effect of Social Variables

With the spread of the corona virus, teaching Persian to non-Persian speakers, like other disciplines, turned to virtual and online education, and teachers faced new challenges in teaching Persian different aspects. One of these aspects was the prepositions teaching as polysemous categories. In language books, meanings of prepositions are usually presented in a list, and this problem makes learning them difficult. On the other hand, the cognitive grammar confirms the semantic network of prepositions around the prototype meaning. In this research, at first, using the semantic network of simple prepositions "از، با، به، تا، در", curriculum content was designed. Then, based on the cognitive theory of multimedia learning, a combined verbal-visual multimedia tool (animation) was used and the content was tested with 52 samples. The results of statistical analysis showed that the progress of language learners was significant. It can be concluded that the teaching of prepositions with research tools has been effective. In addition to the language level variable, social intervening variables of age, gender, nationality, field of study and status were also measured. The findings indicate that gender, nationality, field of study and age has had a significant effect. But other variables didn’t have a significant effect.