Harnessing the Power of Short Stories in the Persian Language Classroom: Strategies for Maximized Student Engagement and Proficiency Development

Eliciting free-constructed responses from learners in the language classroom is one of the core principles of instructed SLA (Ellis, 2008). With this principle in mind, one of the best ways to create highly engaging, culturally rich, and meaningful contexts in the classroom is the incorporation of short stories as instructional materials. Along with their cultural, literary and aesthetic value, as well as the possibilities that level-appropriate short stories provide for the acquisition of certain grammatical structures and lexical items, one key affordance is the potential of short stories for dialogic reading and purposeful communication, or “talk around the text” (Ivanič and Weldon, 2000). This presentation will focus on techniques that provide opportunities for learners to use their developing language skills -with appropriate scaffolding- to express their own personal meanings, and participate in individual, pair, or group activities that position them as “discoverers” and “creators of meaning” through short stories. Sample activities will be shared from an advanced Persian class where The Story of the Rabbit and the Tomato by Zoya Pirzad is the central short story to illustrate how learners can engage in information gap, reasoning-gap, and opinion-gap activities and bring their own backgrounds, personal responses and interpretations to the “voices and choices” (Daniels, 2023) of the central character. In addition, multimodal sources such as recorded interviews with the author, podcasts and digital story telling platforms, and drawing on comparisons to other authors that students are familiar with, all provide a rich, motivating context for interactive input beyond the text of the short story.