Advanced Persian through Literature: Close Reading, Long Compositions, Formative Feedback

About the Talk: In this talk, I will discuss the challenges and positive impacts of embedding ‘close reading, long compositions, and formative feedback’ in all the language and content modules we created for the Persian group at the University of St Andrews. In our language modules across the two sub-honours and two honours years, this was done alongside an eclectic method of language teaching that involved grammar-translation, drills, and communicative approaches, along with a variety of activities that also included oral reproduction of passages or compositions. In our content modules, however, since the focus is on enhancing students’ transferable skills in analysing poems, prose narratives, films, plays and songs and learning about the history of these cultural products in the Persianate world, the process was more focused on close reading sessions of certain type of texts, discussing them in English and then requiring the students to write one of the major pieces of their coursework (a 2000-words critical portfolio) in Persian. In my talk, I briefly analyse the results of using this system in general and its impact on the improvement of students’ proficiency in both receptive and productive language skills.

About the Speaker: Saeed Talajooy is a Senior Lecturer (Associate Professor) in Persian at the University of St Andrews, UK. Talajooy has taught English and comparative literature, Persian language, literature, theatre, and cinema in Iran and the UK. His research is on the reflections of the changing patterns of Iranian identity in Persian literature and Iranian cinema, and theatre. His most recent publications include a monograph entitled Iranian Culture in Bahram Beyzaie’s Cinema in Theatre: Paradigms of Being and Belonging (I. B. Tauris, 2023), an edited volume entitled The Plays and Films of Bahram Beyzaie: Origins, Forms and Functions (I. B. Tauris, 2024), and two books which in each case include a translation of a play by Bahram Beyzaie and its analysis: The One Thousand and First Night and Afra or the Day Is Passing.