Amirreza Vakilifard

Amirreza Vakilifard in Education Sciences (Second Languages Didactics) from the University of Montreal in Canada in 2007. ^[1] He is the founding member of the first-ever Persian Language teaching department aimed at foreign learners in Iran. He has been teaching Persian language to foreign students since 1996 at the Imam Khomeini International University (IKIU) in Qazvin, Iran.

He established the M.A. program in Persian Language Didactics at the IKIU since 2014 and has been teaching the above program at other Iranian universities, including Allameh Tabatabyi, Beheshti, Payam-e Noor since 2010. For the first time in Iran, Dr. Vakilifard initiated and designed the Bachelor (B.A) program in “Teaching Persian Language” to foreign and Iranian students. This required designing syllabi and determining the goals and the teaching resources for the program's 70 specialized, compulsory, and optional courses.^[2] He was the Deputy-Director of the Persian Language Center at IKIU from 1995 to 2002 and again from 2011 to 2013, and he has been appointed as the Director of the Persian Language Center of the IKIU since 2013. In 2011, he established the "Journal of Teaching Persian to Speakers of Other Languages",^[3] Iran's first academic periodical in the field, in which he serves as Director-in-Charge and Editor-in-Chief until 2020. Dr. Vakilifard is a frequent speaker at conferences and conducts regular workshops for Persian language teachers in Iran and abroad.

In 2017, Dr. Vakilifard designed and founded SAMFA (Persian acronym for standard assessment test of Persian language skills) that is the most widely-used test of proficiency in Persian language. He provided the scientific framework and supporting documents for the test. The test has been repeatedly administered in Iran and simultaneously, in five other countries.^[4]