Penn Language Center

An intensive, one-semester course designed to teach the reading and writing of standard Tehran Persian to those with a speaking knowledge of that language. In recent years there has been an increasing demand from Persian-speaking Iranian-American students for formal instruction in Persian. While many of these students have some degree of spoken fluency in Persian, they are often unable to read or write it. Their speaking ability makes it difficult to integrate them into first- or second-year classes of students who have started with no knowledge of Persian. If these Persian-speaking students could be brought to at least a second-year level of reading and writing, they could then be enrolled in more advanced courses in Persian where they would be more or less at the same level as other students. The course will focus on the lexical and syntactic differences between written and spoken Persian, and the problems of Persian spelling.