Dr Mahbod Ghaffari

Recent Publications

Books:

• 2025, Persian for Dummies, Daience Publishing, ISBN 9781918176001
• 2021, Persian beyond Borders, Ketab Bahar Publications, ISBN 9786227067248
• 2021, Fārsi bīyāmuzīm! 2 (Let's Learn Persian!) Intermediate, 2nd Edition Madreseh Publications, ISBN 9789640819913

Articles and Book Chapters:

• 2025, “Grammaticalisation of “dāshtan” in Persian”, in Persian Language Pedagogy: New Trends and Innovations, Taylor & Francis, pp 546-566, ISBN 9781003612872 
• 2021, “University of Cambridge, Asian, Middle Eastern and Persian Studies during the pandemic”, in The World Universities Response to Covid-19: Remote Online Language Teaching, Research-publishing.net, pp 295-305, ISBN 9782490057917 
• 2020, “Persian as an interlanguage”, in The Routledge Handbook of Second Language Acquisition and Pedagogy in Persian, Routledge, pp 546-566, ISBN 9781138333055

Project 1: CAMBEL Persian Learner Corpus

My new joint project is Cambridge-Belgrade Persian Learner Corpus (CAMBEL) that my colleague Dr Saeed Safari from University of Belgrade and I have been working on for a long time and we launched its first phase in December 2023 at the 4th International Conference on Teaching Persian Language and Literature in Cambridge. This corpus is the first of its kind and we work hard on this project to get it to its second phase.

Any L2 learner corpus plays an essential role in second language research and pedagogy, and can be used by researchers to study how learners of a second language acquire the new language and it is a useful source of data for language teachers and authors to design teaching and learning tools (including coursebooks, apps, videos, online resources, etc.). I hope the development of CAMBEL helps Persian teachers and researchers in their professional career.

Project 2: The CamBel International Persian Proficiency Test (CamBel IPPT)

The CamBel International Persian Proficiency Test (CamBel IPPT) is another new collaborative project developed and led by myself and Dr Saeed Safari, associate professor at the Faculty of Philology, University of Belgrade. This initiative is being formed with the aim of designing the first academically grounded and CEFR-aligned proficiency examination for the Persian language—an assessment intended to respond to long-acknowledged needs within Iranian Studies and Persian language education.

The CamBel IPPT aims to address these challenges by establishing a scientifically informed and pedagogically meaningful testing model. A key element of the project is its integration with the Cambridge–Belgrade Persian Learner Corpus (CAMBEL), a joint research endeavour that compiles authentic linguistic data from learners of Persian. This corpus allows the development of proficiency descriptors, task types, and scoring criteria grounded in real learner performance rather than intuition or models borrowed from unrelated languages.

The central objective of the project is to design and standardise a CEFR-aligned, multi-level, four skill examination covering levels A1 to C2. To achieve this, the project includes several components: drafting test specifications and level descriptors, constructing and calibrating an item bank, developing secure exam delivery modes for online and in-person administration, and designing examiner and marker training procedures to ensure scoring reliability. Pilot testing at multiple institutions, followed by statistical validation—including Rasch modeling—will be carried out to refine and validate the assessment.