Identifying and Classifying the Challenges of Persian Language Instructors to Non-Persian Speakers in Multicultural Classes

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