A Comparison of English and Persian Oral and Written Performances in Syntax

Abstract

This contrastive study investigated similarities and particularly differences between
English and Persian in the area of syntax to find if the basic sentence patterns formulated by
former studies suffice or we need more ones or even some modifications. The subjects recruited
in this study were fifty advance male and female learners of English who were studying English
in the researcher’s classes as their foreign language. The instruments of the study were (a)
classroom compositions and (b) data obtained through conversations among learners during the
classes Compositions and conversations were on different topics and themes in English. Data
were obtained from at least 150 compositions and through various conversations during 20
sessions. All the problematic areas in syntax were explored and matched with the most
problematic basic sentence patterns offered by Yarmohammadi (1995) in terms of sentential
meaning and they were juxtaposed, compared, and contrasted with their Persian counterparts
and at later stages syntactic rules were utilized as common bases. Then, the areas of major
learning difficulties were predicted and specified. Also the researcher faced some new patterns
which were problematic due to the interference of Persian influence.