Content Analysis of Selected Children's and Adolescent Stories with the Approach of "Applying Frequently Used Persian Verbs and Tenses" in Teaching Persian Languag

Background and Objectives: The significance of children's literature in language acquisition is universally acknowledged. Stories serve as a rich linguistic input, exposing learners to vocabulary, grammatical structures, and cultural nuances in a contextualized manner. Among grammatical elements, verbs are the cornerstone of sentence construction, carrying the core meaning of actions, states, and events. The mastery of frequently used verbs and their tenses is crucial for developing fluency and narrative competence in a language. In the context of teaching Persian to speakers of other languages or even to native children, a systematic analysis of the linguistic content of educational materials is essential. This study posits that a deliberate focus on the verbs and tenses most commonly employed in high-quality children's literature can inform and optimize pedagogical practices. The primary objective of this research is to identify, categorize, and analyze the most frequently used verbs and their tenses in a selection of acclaimed Persian stories for children and adolescents. The ultimate goal is to provide a data-driven foundation for developing more effective language teaching resources and methodologies that align with authentic language use. Methods: This study employed a quantitative content analysis approach. The research population consisted of prominent award-winning and critically acclaimed Persian storybooks for the 6-12 age group published between 2015 and 2023. A purposive sample of 20 storybooks from authors such as Houshang Moradi Kermani, Farhad Hassanzadeh, and Afsaneh Shabannezhad was selected. The entire text of each story constituted the research material. The data collection instrument was a researcher-designed checklist for verb extraction, categorizing verbs based on their lemma (masdar) and recording their frequency and tense (past, present, present subjunctive, imperative, etc.). The procedure involved multiple readings of each text, extracting every verb, lemmatizing them to their dictionary form, and tallying their frequency and tense usage. Data analysis was performed using descriptive statistics (frequency, percentage, mean) with SPSS software (Version 26) to identify the most frequent verbs and the distribution of tenses across the corpus. Findings: Analysis of over 60,000 words of text revealed a core set of high-frequency verbs. The most frequent verbs identified were: "بودن" (to be), "داشتن" (to have), "کردن" (to do), "گفتن" (to say), "شدن" (to become), "رفتن" (to go), "آمدن" (to come), "خوردن" (to eat), "دیدن" (to see), and "دانستن" (to know). Regarding tense usage, the simple past tense was overwhelmingly dominant, constituting approximately 65% of all verb occurrences, which aligns with the narrative nature of the texts. The present tense accounted for about 25%, primarily used in dialogues and descriptive passages. The imperative and subjunctive moods, while less frequent, were present and significant for understanding modal uses. Statistical analysis (Chi-square test) confirmed a significant relationship (p < 0.01) between the genre of the story (e.g., adventure, everyday life) and the frequency of certain verb types. Conclusion: The findings confirm that a distinct set of verbs forms the functional core of the Persian language as used in children's literature. The extreme prevalence of the simple past tense highlights its fundamental role in storytelling. These results have direct pedagogical implications. Syllabus designers and material developers for teaching Persian should prioritize this high-frequency verb lexicon and ensure systematic and contextualized instruction of the simple past tense from the early stages of learning. It is recommended that language exercises and graded readers be developed based on such corpus-derived data to enhance vocabulary acquisition and grammatical accuracy. A limitation of this study was the focus on written texts, which may not fully capture the verb usage in spontaneous spoken Persian. Future research could analyze audio-visual media for children or conduct longitudinal studies on the acquisition of these verbs by learners.