short biography

Mahinnaz Mirdehghan Farashah is a multi-lingual associate professor of general and applied linguistics at Shahid Beheshti University (SBU; formerly National University of Iran/Tehran). She received her Ph.D. in General Linguistics (2005) and her M.A. in Teaching Persian to Speakers of Other Languages (TPSOL; 1999) from Ferdowsi University of Mashhad, Iran. She has been a visiting researcher at University of Konstanz, Germany (2004), where she conducted her Ph.D. research with Prof. Miriam Butt. Dr. Mirdehghan is best known for her works on TPSOL, as well as Typology of Indo-Iranian languages. She has been a Persian teacher educator of TPSOL for educating trainees for teaching Persian language to foreign students since 2005 at SBU as an MA program. Being a committee member of "planning and development of linguistics" at Iranian ministry of sciences (MSRT) and developing the Ph.D. program of TPSOL (2015), since 2018 she established the program at SBU; by which, SBU became the second university in Iran, permitted by the Iranian ministry of sciences to establish the program. She has also been a member of the management committees of “Standard Persian Language Test (SAMFA)”, “Planning, Research and Development of Linguistics”, “Virtual Education” and “Developing Persian Course Books” at the International Scientific Cooperation Center of Iranian Ministry of Science. She has various publications in international academic journals as well as chapters in edited volumes. A recent book chapter of her is in the Routledge Handbook of second language acquisition and pedagogy of Persian, where she provides a geographical classification of Persian teaching centers and programs globally. Dr. Mirdehghan has guided main projects as: SBU-MIT OCW joint project (2006-2012) with launching OCW site, Persian Framework of Reference for Teaching Persian (2016), Professional Series of PARFA in TPSOL for teaching Persian with general purposes (2018) [the series of which include: Student’s Book, Work Book, and Teacher’s Book for three levels of Elementary, Intermediate, and Advanced], as well as PARFA China, for teaching Persian to adult Chinese speakers. Developing Persian Reference Framework (PRF) can be considered as one of her well known works; which, due to its holistic and multi-year structure, provided the possibility for the further assessments of its effectiveness. The claim was evidenced in that the PRF was used and evaluated in the process of developing new educational course-book series for teaching Persian to adults, including (a) professional series entitled PARFA, and (b) a book series entitled PARFA China; which substantiated the high effectiveness of PRF. In addition, the matter is being continued in her upcoming works in developing course books for teaching Persian to speakers of other languages at different age groups as well as designing applications accordingly. She is a frequent speaker in world conferences on language and conducts regular workshops for Persian language teachers in Iran and abroad, and has been chosen as the “Distinguished Researcher of the year” of Shahid Beheshti University several times (2011 and 2017). She is also an Amazon Author and publishing her books on Amazon. Her Author Page is: https://amazon.com/author/mirdehghan