Research studies regarding Teaching Persian to Iranian-Origin Children Abroad

Teaching Persian to a child growing up abroad is not the same problem as teaching Persian to a beginner. These articles set out what the research says about that difference, and how it shapes the way we teach and the materials we publish.

They are written for parents, teachers and anyone deciding how a diaspora child should be taught — long enough to be useful, and referenced so that any claim can be checked.

  1. 1. Teaching Persian to Iranian-Origin Children Abroad as a Heritage Language: A Theoretical Review of Recent Findings

    Why heritage learners are a distinct group, and what six strands of research say about teaching them. The longest and most technical article here.

  2. 2. Characteristics of an Online Persian Language Tutor in the Diaspora

    What to look for in a teacher, and the difference between a child who already understands Farsi and one meeting it for the first time.

  3. 3. Why Teach Persian to Immigrant Kids? A 20-Year Academic Review (2005–2025)

    The cognitive, academic and family arguments for keeping the language, with the studies behind each.

  4. 4. How Persian Tutors Should Teach Farsi to Kids: Six Evidence-Based Methods

    Comprehensible input, Total Physical Response, modelled dialogue and three more — what each looks like in a real lesson.

  5. 5. Why Children Forget Farsi: What First Language Attrition Research Actually Shows

    What attrition is, what age really has to do with it, and what actually predicts whether a child keeps the language.

  6. 6. How Our Persian Children's Books Are Designed: One Learning Theory per Volume

    Each volume of our picture-book series is built on a different learning theory. The design decisions each one forced, shown with pages from the books.

About this section

Online Persian School has delivered more than 35,000 classes since 2018, to students in over 20 countries. These articles are written by our curriculum team in London, Ontario — Dr. Ataollah Zarei, whose doctoral research is in engineering education and whose published work is in educational technology and mobile learning, and Shohreh Sharifi, a national teaching-award recipient in Iran who has personally taught more than 20,000 lessons.

We hold ourselves to three rules here. Every substantive claim carries a source. Where the evidence is contested we say so rather than presenting one side as settled. And where something is our own practice rather than a research finding, it is labelled as such — including the places where we have had to correct earlier versions of these pages.

Persian is markedly under-represented in the heritage-language literature, which is dominated by Spanish, Russian and Chinese. Much of what we cite is applied to Persian by reasonable inference rather than direct study, and we try to be explicit about where that line falls.

Questions, corrections and disagreements are welcome at books@onlinepersianschool.net. If you would rather see the approach in a lesson than read about it, the first week of classes is free.