Investigating the Performance of Kurdish Learners of EFL in the Area of Illocutionary Speech Acts

The paper is an attempt to investigate the performance of Kurdish learners of English as a foreign language (EFL) in the area of illocutionary speech acts. It has been repeatedly experienced that Kurdish learners have difficulty in carrying out speech acts that look natural English. Most of their speech acts seem to be mere translation of speech acts in their native language. The paper argues for the idea that these learners face serious difficulty in performing this type of speech acts, both at the recognition and production levels. It also argues that the difficulty in this area can be due to certain factors among which are lack of linguistic knowledge of the FL and its culture, interference of the native language (NL) with the FL, and lack of pragmatic competence. To determine the type of difficulty and diagnose its sources, a test has been administered to a sample of students. A number of conclusions have been drawn in the light of the results of the test.