Kurdish Students' Writing Problems on the Mechanics of English as a Foreign Language

The present study investigated the type and frequency of the common errors in the written performance of
EFL students in the Kurdistan region of Iraq, considering the correct use of Mechanics of writing, and also
compared the errors made by students in the two groups of Male and Female Kurdish EFL learners. In this
regard using a composition test, the errors made by the participants were analyzed. Moreover the inter-rater
reliability was estimated to ensure the reliability of the instrument and the obtained results, and in order to
add to the reliability and the validity of the results, a checklist was designed, developed and used by the
researcher as a framework for correcting and analyzing the errors made by the students, which contained a
list of the most identified elements of writing mechanics. The results revealed that generally the major
problems of Kurdish students and the most errors they made were on the elements of Capitalization (61%),
Punctuation (88%), and paragraphing (87%). However female students found to have generally much better
performance than the male students in this respect.