Language functions as manipulated by Iraqi EFL university students

الملخص EN

The core of this paper is about language functions as one of the important skills which are used in different daily situations.

Besides, it focuses on what difficulties the students of English as a foreign language encounter in producing them.

Therefore, the study has undertaken toidentify the students' performance in recognizing and producing language functions and find out the causes of the students' errors and their sources.

To achieve these objectives, the study has hypothesized that Iraqi university students face difficulty in using language functions.

Then, a test has been designed and applied on a sample of (50) students at the Fourth Year, Department of English, College of Education, University of Babylon during the academic year (2015-2016).

The results got from collecting and analyzing the students’ performance affirm that the students encounter difficulty on the production level but they show efficiency on the recognition one.

This is obvious from the number of their correct responses as compared with their incorrect ones on both levels.