Investigating Iraqi EFL Learners' Ability to Recognize and Use of English Concord

Concord is a general grammatical term used to indicate harmony or agreement between various parts of a sentence, particularly between subject and verb. Such a grammatical phenomenon is regarded as an essential part of English syntax. The issue of grammatical concord is one of the common challenges that students encounter in their language learning. This problem arises when there is a mismatch between the subject and the verb in a sentence, leading to grammatical errors. Understanding and mastering concord is crucial for effective communication and writing. Dealing with this aspect of English grammar requires due attention and thorough investigation as they are said to be a perplexing area and represent a pedagogical problem for the Iraqi learners of English as a foreign language (EFL). The aim of this paper is to investigate the Iraqi EFL learners' mastery of concord constructions at both recognition and production levels. The study adopts the hypothesis that that Iraqi EFL learners face more difficulty in producing sentences using concord rules than recognizing them. It is also hypothesized that there is no significant difference between the scores of the recognition test and production test . As a procedure, seventy-five students from various high schools took part in a test which is divided into two parts, Recognition Test and Production Test to reach reliable results. The results obtained indicate that Iraqi EFL learners encounter greater difficulty in producing these constructions compared to recognizing them. Moreover, the results show that a significant difference was found when the scores of the production test of the three schools were compered to each other.