Educational Strategies used by Kurdish EFL Teachers for Teaching Writing to Young Learners in KRI Public Schools

dc.abstract.en	Abstract The current study aims to examine the educational strategies Kurdish EFL teachers use for teaching English writing to young learners in Kurdistan public basic schools. The purpose of this research was five-fold: to identify the educational approaches Kurdish EFL teachers employ for teaching English writing and the factors that influence their approaches; to investigate the types of writing teachers deliver in public basic schools in Erbil, the capital of the Kurdistan Region of Iraq (KRI), to identify the extent to which Kurdish young students practice writing; to explore the challenges students face when writing in English; to discover whether the Sunrise course book has significant impact on enhancing students’ writing skills, if not, then to identify the drawbacks that make it ineffective. The present study employed mixed methods approaches, combining quantitative and qualitative methods. The tools used are a questionnaire and semi-structured interviews. The participants are English teachers who teach English to young students in twenty public basic schools in Kurdistan. The questionnaire was completed by 30 teachers, 14 males and 16 females. Then, among those 30 teachers, three teachers were selected randomly for the interview to obtain in-depth information about the topic. The study found that Kurdish EFL teachers use product-based approaches when teaching writing. Students’ writing does not undergo through the process of writing, instead they are asked for the final version of their writing. Moreover, teachers teach only descriptive and narrative types of writing and neglect the others. This could be due to students’ ages and levels, and curriculum constraints, in which these two types are suitable to teach at early stages of learning and the Sunrise course books include only these two types of writing. Furthermore, another finding of this study was that students at basic schools practice English writing infrequently and they face several challenges when writing. Among these challenges, linguistic problems, lack of knowledge about the topic, and first language interference were among the most common barriers that students experience when writing in English. The last finding of this study was that the Sunrise textbooks have a minor role in enhancing students’ writing skills. The course books contain insufficient writing activities. Many of them only require students to write missing letters, words, phrases, sentences, or short, simple paragraphs, which might be below the proficiency level of some students.
dc.affiliation	Uniwersytet Warszawski
dc.affiliation.department	Wydział Pedagogiczny
dc.contributor.author	Khoshnaw, Balen
dc.contributor.promoter	Smogorzewska, Joanna
dc.contributor.reviewer	Wołowicz, Agnieszka
dc.contributor.reviewer	Smogorzewska, Joanna
dc.date.defence	2025-09-29
dc.date.issued	2025
dc.date.submitted	2025-09-16
dc.identifier.apd	245697
dc.language	en
dc.language.other	pl
dc.publisher	Uniwersytet Warszawski
dc.rights	ClosedAccess
dc.subject.en	Educational Strategies
dc.subject.en	English writing
dc.subject.en	Young learners
dc.subject.en	KRI
dc.subject.en	public schools
dc.title	Educational Strategies used by Kurdish EFL Teachers for Teaching Writing to Young Learners in KRI Public Schools
dc.type	MasterThesis