frequency of grammatical tenses in written and spoken farsi: seeking the priorities in teaching farsi grammar

teaching the grammatical tenses is considered to be one of the most controversial challenges among teachers and researchers in teaching persian language to non-persian speakers. prioritizing the tenses in accordance with their frequency could greatly facilitate the process of language learning. in this research, a comparison has been made between the frequency of the tenses in spoken and written farsi. to do so, the group of virtual teaching persian language and literature of  al-mustafa university has examined a number of farsi newspapers (written corpus) and movies (spoken corpus) to explore the frequency of tenses in them. after extracting and counting the tenses, the findings have been classified in three groups: high frequent, middle-frequent and low-frequent tenses. the results indicated that in spoken corpus, the frequency of tenses was in the following order: “hal-e-eltezami, hal-e-ekhbari, ast verb, gozashte-ye-sade, and amr” and in written corpus the most frequent tenses respectively are: “gozashte-ye-sade, hal-e-eltezami, hal-e-ekhbari, ast verb, and gozashte-ye-naghli”. our findings can help the syllabus designers in prioritizing the educational materials according to their daily usage and frequency.