In my case yes, definitely. Grades 7 & 8.
Be interesting to hear where your “conventional wisdom” notion comes from.
Iranian high schools also offer foreign languages, and will continue to do so. In fact SFAIK Arabic and a second foreign language are in fact required in the Iranian high school curriculum.
What they are banning is the teaching of English in primary schools (which covers up to grade 6). From the Reuter’s report, English is usually not offered until grade 7 or later in any case, so the practical impact of the ban may not be huge; it seems more designed to send a signal. It’s notable (again, from the Reuter’s report) that the ban seems to apply only to English; primary schools are apparently free to offer Arabic, Chinese, etc if they wish. (And, from the point of view of catering to tourists and doing business in the region, Chinese might turn out to be the better long-term bet.)
One thing they might be doing here is to tamp down on the brain drain. Many of the countries that are attractive for an educated Persian trying to GTH out of Iran are English-speaking. Limiting their citizens’ mastery of English makes them less attractive to potential destination countries.
I’m not sure if that’s too Machiavellian for the Ayatollahs.
I doubt this. There’s no ban on English in secondary schools, where study of a foreign language is mandatory, and English is by a considerable distance the most popular choice.
Few primary schools offer English at present, so banning it will have little practical impact. I think the ban is intended to signal to supporters of the Revolution that the government is llstening to and responding to their ideological concerns, rather than than to make any difference to the general level of English-speaking ability in Iranian society.
It would appear that many posters here don’t understand what a “primary school” is. It was in the first sentence in the OP, btw. Primary school. Not Jr High. Not High School. Primary school.
Grades 7-8 is not elementary.
*
The teaching of English usually starts in middle school in Iran, around the ages of 12 to 14, but some primary schools, below that age, also have English classes.*
Conventional wisdom is usually pretty conspicuous to people living in the times, but might not be easily reconstituted later on, as it might not have occurred to anyone to empirically document conventional wisdom for the edification of successive generations.
No, conventional wisdom is nearly always documented by the fact that people actually simply accept it as true, and thus will show up in their writings. It shouldn’t be too hard to find.
That said, conventional wisdom isn’t really worth much in an area that is as well studied as this. Surely there are actual studies on language acquisition rates at different ages.
Still, I agree with you that primary school at most extends to sixth grade, around age 12. I am surprised this is not common knowledge. Even if your area has a middle school that starts earlier, that simply means primary school ends earlier, too.
I did learn that wrong in my French diction class, because femme is a special case. Normally, the rule is that -em is nasalized anh, but -emme is like how English says the letter M. But femme is an older word that got nasalized and then denasalized, so it’s pronounced /fam/.
(/a/ is somewhat close to the a in cat, but closer to the first part of the i in kite, without the diphthong. Maybe a better idea is the I in “fire” as it is pronounced in some Southern accents. like in Georgia.)
Yes, but they call it Farsi. It is an Indo-European language incidentally.
Nah, they’re daring Trump to ban English from American elementary education. I predict Trump will rise to the challenge and ban English from all grades, up until college. “My ban is bigger than yours, Iran!”
It would be really weird for the Iranian government to put any restrictions on teaching Arabic considering it’s the language of the Koran.
Yes, they call Persian “Farsi” and they call English “Englizi.” In Germany they call their own language “Deutsch” although we call it “German.” In Japan, what we call Japanese they call “Nihongo” and they call English “Eigo.” We can do this all day.
Actually, there is a distinction. Farsi is the version of Persian which predominates in Iran and is the official language of that country. Other forms of Persian include Dari, spoken in Afghanistan and one of the official languages of that country, and Tajiki, used in Tajikistan and Uzbekistan.
Would it kill you to google Farsi?
Unless they are speaking English, or talking about the Persian roots of Urdu, in which case they call it Persian. The Iranians are still reflexibly proud of the fact the Persia was the centre of the civilized world, and that Persian was the language of literacy and diplomacy, and still regard it that way to a certain extent. It shows in their automatic belief that America cares and is concerned about their activities, and partly explains their involvement in nuclear programs: not because they suffer from a relevance deficet, but because, assuming that they are the centre of the world, they also assume that the world cares about controling and containing them.
It is particularly evident from the vantage point of Australia, because Australians deep down all know that we live in an irrelevant country on the far side of the world. Iranians don’t feel that way. And the language (in English), is Persian: a language of the Rosetta Stone, when your ancestors were barbarians living in huts.
PS: there was a long standing American pedagogic belief that teaching a second language confused young minds and interfered with education. It was still common, though not univrsal, in the 1960’s. At one time, it also provided a theoretical basis for not permitting native americans, or spanish speakers, to use languages other than english is schools.
Even now, there are American teachers who believe that students using Spanish is school to communicate with theor peers are fundamentally undercutting their education and being personally, deliberately insubordiate to any adult within earshot. I’ve had teachers come to me distressed beyond words because a kid in their class will ask a second kid, in Spanish, to clarify instructions the first kid didn’t understand.
The catholic school I went to in the 60’s started 1st graders off with learning French songs and in the 4th grade a formal class was started in French.
You’re absolutely right about Persian. My point is that when we’re talking about the language they speak in Stuttgart, we don’t call it Deutsch (unless we’re trying to be pretentious). It’s German for us English speakers. Likewise, the language spoken in Tehran is Persian when we’re speaking in English.
Want a cite? How about the government of Iran’s home page? In English they call their language Persian.
Nitpick: The languages on the Rosetta Stone are Egyptian and Greek. Old Persian does have some renowned Achaemanid inscriptions on the rock of Behistun—many centuries older than the Rosetta Stone (which is from late Ptolemaic times).
I attended Catholic school through 8th grade in the 1960s–70s, and there was zilch foreign language instruction offered. Not even a bit of Latin! The first chance I had to take foreign languages was high school, where the choices were French or Spanish.
By the time my children went to public school in the 1990s, they could learn French, Spanish, or Japanese. That’s what I call progress.
I had been sent to a Montessori school as far as (the equivalent of) 1st grade and only transferred into a regular school in 2nd grade. At the Montessori school, which was not structured into any syllabus, there was a girl about my age whose vocation was to become a French teacher. She would grab me and insist on giving me French lessons. What spoiled it for me was right in the first lesson, a picture of a clown with the French word: “le clown.” I was all: You can’t kid me, that’s English! Besides, I hated clowns. That put me off French at the time. When I saw her coming for me, I would go somewhere else to avoid her.
I didn’t learn French until I got to high school in 9th grade. When I registered, I had elected Spanish class, but since I had tested high on pre-registration language aptitude, they stuck me in French class instead.
Oddly, I had two classes in two different Catholic schools (2nd and 3rd grade) where some Spanish was taught. Not much, but some. This would have been early 1960s.
In a different odd way, I was also an alter boy before Vatian II and the mass was still in Latin. No one bothered to give us any instruction in Latin even though we had to read all the responses to what the priest said. In those days, the congregation did not read the response, only the alter boys did. And the priest faced away from the congregation most of the time. And I remembered enough of the Latin (from having repeated it so many times) that when I finally got to HS and studied Spanish, I remember a few times thinking: Oh, that’s what the Latin words meant!