THE EFFECT OF TEACHING STANDARD PERSIAN-ENGLISH COGNATE WORDS ON INCREASING LEXICAL KNOWLEDGE IN IRANIAN EFL LEARNERS

The study was conducted to determine how EFL students' knowledge of English vocabulary and awareness of Persian-English cognates influence their comprehension of English expository text. Cross-language cognates (words with similar form and meaning in different languages) are of special interest for designing a model in TEFL, since they help teachers make the teaching of English vocabularies a joyful and lasting effect for Iranian students. True cognates are the result of kinship relations across languages, or borrowings. False and true cognates might be found in nearly all languages with any kind of relation to other languages. There are still some "real" cognates found in the lexicon of Persian and English. The conclusions of this study will provide new insights into the linguistic and communication problems derived from a misuse of these lexical items. The results of this study showed that cognate teaching has a positive effect on the vocabulary knowledge of the students.