Investigating the Textual Competence of Iraqi EFL University Students' Abilities in Essay Writing

Textual competence is important for an efficient writer because it concerned with coherence and rhetorical organization. The present research aims to identify, Iraqi University students' textual competence in writing an essay at Tikrit university ; Iraqi University students' knowledge about cohesion and rhetorical organization in writing an essay at Tikrit university and finally the difficulty in using textual competence among Iraq university students according to gender variable at Tikrit university. The sample consists of 160 Iraqi university students at forth stage in the department of English, College of Education for humanities at Tikrit University during the academic year 2023-2024. An achievement test is used to gather the data about students' textual competence in writing an essay. Results show that university students have high level textual competence than the theoretical mean score , also university students have a higher level in cohesion than the rhetorical organization finally, male students is better than female in their abilities in writing an essay.