The Study of the Impact of Graphic Organizers on Teaching Persian Reading Comprehension to non-Iraninan Persian Learners

Reading comprehension is one of the learning objectives of all language teaching curricula and for teaching it various strategies are used. One of these strategies is Graphic Organizers (GOs) which have their roots in schemata theory and are used for organizing and presenting knowledge. The current study aimed at investigating the impact of graphic organizers strategy on improving foreign Persian learners reading comprehension. This is a quantitative research being done in an experimental manner.15 intermediate and upper intermediate Persian learners participated in the study who were studying M.A at TPSOL (Teaching Persian to Speakers of Other Languages) for the second half of the 2019-2020 (1397-1398) academic year in Allame Tabataba'i university. The instruments used to gain data are reading texts, reading comprehension tests and graphic organizers. In the first session, a reading text was taught through traditional methods and in the second session after instructing graphic organizers a text with the same difficulty was taught using this strategy. At the end of the sessions a reading comprehension test was conducted for measuring effectiveness of the treatment. The data analyzed using paired t-test and the results showed a significant difference between reading comprehension through traditional instruction compared to graphic organizers strategy, suggesting that employing graphic organizers had facilitated students reading comprehension.