An investigation about language learning problems at elementary levels in bilingual areas of Iran

Abstract

This investigation was conducted to specify child language learning phonological, morphological, and syntactic problems in listening comprehension, speaking, reading and writing skills of Persian at elementary level in bilingual areas of the I.R. Iran, where Turkish and Arabic speaking children are supposed to learn Persian at school. The findings of this study show that these children have more listening comprehension problems in the first two months of the educational year, but the problems decline in the next months. The most frequent morphological problems of Arabic speaking Persian learners are in verbal inflections (mode, tense, number …) and subject-verb agreement. Bilingual learners of Persian in these areas use limited code in speech and their speech contains grammatical nonconformities. They have technical problems in reading and writing as well. The comparative study of Turkish and Arabic with Persian and measuring it against the findings of the survey research in this study show that the differences of these Persian. Vice versa, the phonological, morphological and syntactic commonalities between children's native tongue languages with Persian is a significant hinder causing problems for bilingual learners of and Persian ease up the learning process. Having considered the problems of bilingual Persian learners among the speakers of different languages and dialects spoken in Iran, a consideration regarded for choosing Arabic and Turkish speaking bilingual speakers was the fact that these two languages are not from the same language branch as Persian.