ABC or BCA: What to Teach First: A Psycholinguistic Approach to Teaching Persian as a Second Language

Abstract:

Psycholinguistics deals with the processing of language in the mind. Its findings can shed light on the ways our brain best acquires a second language. One of the discussions in psycholinguistics is declarative versus procedural knowledge and the order in which lexical items and grammatical rules are acquired by first and second language speakers. This paper delves into the mind of second language learners and the processes of acquisition and production of second language at various levels of proficiency. It aims at identifying the best strategies to facilitate the learning of some linguistic concepts in classroom contexts through the findings of psycholinguistic studies.

Bio:

Pouneh Shabani-Jadidi is Instructional Professor of Persian at the University of Chicago. She was awarded a Ph.D. in Linguistics from the University of Ottawa in 2012 and another Ph.D. in Applied Linguistics from Tehran Azad University in 2004. Her research focuses on second language acquisition and pedagogy, as well as psycholinguistics and Persian literary translation. She is the author of Processing Compound Verbs in Persian: A Psycholinguistic Approach to Complex Predicates (2014) and Translation Metacognitive Strategies (2009). In addition, she is the editor of The Routledge Handbook of Second Language Acquisition and Pedagogy of Persian (2020) and co-editor of The Oxford Handbook of Persian Linguistics (2018) and The Routledge Handbook of Persian Literary Translation (2022). She has also published What the Persian Media Says (2014) as well as the three-volume series of Persian language textbooks published by Routledge, entitled, Persian is Sweet.