Iraqi EFL Learners' Knowledge and Use of Adverbial Clauses of Time: A Diagnostic Error-Analysis Study
Abstract
The study is based on a descriptive diagnostic design in which the population consists of 50 fourth-year students in the Department of English at the Islamic University in Najaf taking a 40-questions grammar test. It consisted of four elements: identifying subordinators, sentence filling, sentence merging, and correcting an error. Overall performance (mean total score 24.40 / 40, 61%). The best performance (72%) was on the subordinator recognition task suggesting learners can identify well-formed examples of common time subordinators (when, while, before, after, until, and since) in controlled contexts. The findings indicate that Iraqi EFL learners have partial knowledge of adverbial clauses of time, which is still not sufficient, because more contextualized explicit instruction is needed, which combines form, meaning and use.
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