Amirreza Vakilifard was born in 1968 in Tehran, Iran
.
He obtained his Ph.D.
in Education Sciences (Second Languages Didactics) from the University of Montreal in Canada in 2007.
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 1995 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.
Dr.
Vakilifard 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",Iran's first academic periodical in the field, in which he serves as Director-in-Charge and Editor-in-Chief.
Dr.
Vakilifard is a frequent speaker at conferences and conducts regular workshops for Persian language teachers in Iran and abroad.