Iraqi EFL university learners' use of subjunctive mood

الملخص EN

The subjunctive mood is the one that does not correspond to the regular patterns of sentence structure.

It is one of the essential constructions in English grammar and a problematic area for the Iraqi EFL university learners.

The study aims at investigating the performance of Iraqi EFL university students in using subjunctive mood and its types to find out the area of difficulty in this regard and suggesting remedial work for the alleviation of these difficulties.

It is hypothesized that Iraqi EFL learners encounter difficulty in using the types of subjunctive mood in English.

The study begins with the theoretical aspect encompassing the definition of subjunctive mood and its types.

Then, the practical aspect represented in a diagnostic test applied to a random sample of (60) students taken from the fourth level in the Department of English, College of Education for Human Sciences, University of Babylon to assess their performance at both the recognition and production levels.

According to the results of the whole test, the number and percentage of the incorrect responses for the whole test (640, 57.87 % ) are more than those of correct responses (558, 42.13 % ).

These results indicate that Iraqi EFL university learners face difficulty in using subjunctive mood in English and this, in turn, confirms the hypothesis of the study.

In the light of the results of the test, some conclusions are drawn and a number of suggestions and remedial work are presented so that the learners can overcome the difficulty they encounter in using the topic under investigation.