Persian reference framework: Teaching Persian to speakers of other languages

The necessity for a reference framework (RF) for teaching Persian to speakers of other languages (TPSOL) is an essential issue in different fields of teaching Persian, including (1) materials development, (2) course design, (3) proficiency tests, and (4) certificating. Defining grammatical, lexical and functional contents for each educational level is also important. The present paper aims to introduce the process of the development of a Persian Reference Framework (PRF) which is mainly based on the Common European Framework of Reference (CEFR) and its being localized for Persian. This paper describes the preparation, evaluation and performance progression of PRF, which has been approved as the Persian framework of reference by the International scientific cooperation center of the Iranian ministry of sciences. The paper also explains the content selection procedure of the three main domains in PRF (i.e., grammar, vocabulary, and function) and demonstrates how these domains were tailored to Persian proficiency levels to describe elementary, intermediate, and advanced level learners of Persian from other languages. The results showed that 278 lexical, 119 grammatical, and 184 functional fields exist in Persian which have been assigned to the three Persian proficiency levels. The PRF helps its users to make comprehensive choices for their specific group of learners.