چكيده لاتين :
In general, multicultural education is any form of education that includes the
history, texts, values, beliefs, and views of individuals from diverse cultural
backgrounds. In many cases, "culture" is a general term that includes
concepts such as race, ethnicity, nationality, language, religion, social class,
gender, and exceptionality. Studies in the field of multicultural education
show that useful teaching in multicultural classrooms is undoubtedly one of
the biggest challenges that teachers face today (Den Brok & Levy, 2005;
Howard, 2000; Jeevanantham, 2001). One of the reasons for the importance
of multicultural research, especially in the field of language teaching, is that
understanding the diversity of people is one of the most important needs of
educational contexts; Because around the world, classes are becoming more
and more diverse and multicultural (Den Brok & Levy, 2005).
The purpose of this study is to identify, categorize and prioritize the
challenges and problems of Persian language teachers in multicultural
classes and also to provide practical solutions to address these challenges
based on Teachers' opinions and feedback.
Multicultural education was originally born out of the black civil rights
movement in the United States; but it did not take long for all cultural groups
that had been discriminated against to join the movement. The "multicultural
challenge" is so important that it has been called the "fourth force in
psychology" after theories of psychological analysis, behaviorism, and
humanism (Pedersen, 1991). More recently, more attention has been paid to multicultural content education (Berg-Cross, & Takushi-Chinen, 1995;
Ramsey, 2000; Reynolds, 1995; Schoem, et al. 1995), because the many
challenges facing multicultural teachers and educators are more well-known
and more addressed.
According to Ramsey (1996), students' initial knowledge, depth of
understanding, speed of progress, level of cooperation, and degree of
acceptance of the multicultural education process usually vary. These
differences in the development of individual identity may also pose
educational challenges for teachers. Franklin (2001) does not limit the
challenges in multicultural classrooms to race and language, and also
considers religious differences, issues of gender equality, students with
disabilities, single people, or homosexual parents. In addition, the teacher's
ability in terms of awareness, identity development and skill level may affect
all aspects of education. Teachers must maintain and continuously
strengthen their multicultural awareness and have complete control over the
educational content and they have the necessary managerial ability to
manage the classroom, so as to provide welfare and a better learning
environment for students (Reynolds, 1995). Iranian researchers have also
studied the subject of multicultural education; unfortunately, these studies
have not examined Persian language courses for foreigners, which are
mostly multicultural training courses. Most of this research is related to
study of multicultural subject and curriculum (Iraqieh et al., 2009; Sadeghi,
2010; Sadeghi, 2012; Iraqieh, 2013; Malekipour and Hakimzadeh, 2016;
Afshin et al., 2016; Sobhani Nejad et al., 2017) and multiculturalism and
educational resources (Vafaei and Sobhaninejad 2015; Hawas Beigi et al.,
2018). At the National Conference on Multicultural Education, held in
Urmia, various papers were presented in this field, a small number of which
addressed the challenges of teachers in multicultural classes and most of
them on the subject of multicultural curriculum; Javidi (2013) investigated
the problems of teaching due to cultural diversity (Case study: primary
school students in West Azerbaijan province) and Fahimi and Sheikhzadeh
(2013) have also studied the role of teachers in multicultural curriculum
planning from the perspective of high school social studies teachers in
Urmia.The questions of this research are: what are the main challenges and
problems of Persian language teachers in multicultural classes? and which
of these challenges is more frequent and what are the solutions to solve these
problems? To find the answers to these questions, a questionnaire was
designed and used based on theoretical foundations, standard questionnaires
in this field and the views and opinions of 56 experienced Persian language
teachers to foreigners. The validity of the questionnaire was checked by 16
Persian language teachers and it modified and confirmed. The challenges
faced by teachers in Persian language teaching classes to foreigners were
extracted and 9 factors sets were identified based on factor analysis. Data
were statistically analyzed. In this way, we identified various factors and
identified the most important sub-factors and the most common solutions
proposed by the instructors participating in this study were presented to
address these challenges. Ranking the key factors of teachers' challenges in
multicultural classes based on the average rankings shows that cultural
factors are first, educational factors are second, religious factors are third,
and factors of learning, teaching, emotional, motivation, Prior language
skills and social factors ranked fourth to ninth, respectively.
The results of Friedman test showed that these sub-factors are ranked first
in each of the nine factors:
Cultural factor: different values in relation to girl-boy relationships;
Prior language knowledge factor: students' inability to write in the target
language;
Learning factor: different learning styles;
Educational factor: the difficulty of adapting the lessons to the needs of
language learners;
Teaching agent: Finding a teaching method that is useful for all language
learners;
Religious factor: religious and propaganda aspects of the content of
Persian language books;
Motivation factor: lack of interest of some language learners in doing
homework;
Emotional factor: Low teacher's tolerance threshold for existing problems
and teacher's inability to solve problems and social factor: the sub-factor of misunderstanding between learners
with each other in understanding social cues.
Instructors participating in the research suggested the following solutions
to address the challenges of multicultural classrooms:
• Development of the concept of multicultural education;
• Informing teachers about the methods of organizing and designing a
multicultural curriculum;
• Informing instructors of the various approaches to designing and
implementing multicultural learning activities;
• Extensive familiarity of teachers with a variety of resources in the
multicultural curriculum;
• Use of various multicultural approaches in teaching;
• Production of educational content with appropriate cultural content
