Enhancing Iraqi EFL Students’ Discourse Competence by Using Explicit Instruction

Explicit instruction can be used in teaching English to involve a clearly explaining of linguistic concepts and the use of direct strategies that present to the students the direct instruction of a given subject. The current study aims at enhancing Iraqi EFL Students’ Discourse Competence through the use of explicit instruction. It also aims at finding if there are any significant differences between experimental group and control group perform of discourse competence in the post test and finding out the differences among the students in the experimental group according recognition and production levels and according to gender. The sample of the study derived from 2nd year students in English department in the College of Education for Humanities at Tikrit University and it consists of 90 students. They were divided into two groups. The first group included 45 students for the experimental group and the other 45 students for the control group during the Academic year 2022/ 2023. In order to achieve the study’s aims and testing the hypotheses, a discourse completion test is used as data collection tool and it is applied on a sample of the study. The obtained results show that Iraqi EFL students’ discourse competence is enhanced by adopting explicit instruction and their discourse competence can be improved through explicit instruction. Also, their ability to communicate in different contexts can also be enhanced. In the light of the obtained results, some conclusions, recommendations and suggestions for further researches are presented forward.