The study is a descriptive quantitive study, attempt to find the relationships between cognitive linguistic skills (metaphoric thinking, conceptual mapping, and language processing strategies) and syntactic awareness and writing performance among second-year EFL students in the University of Tikrit (n=150) in the 20242025 academic year.We calculated descriptive statistics and Pearson correlations in order to analyze the relationships between constructs using a syntactic awareness test, a cognitive-linguistic skills questionnaire, and an analytic writing rubric test of coherence, cohesion, grammatical accuracy, and lexical range.Findings using yet realistic data demonstrated moderate to strong positive relationships between cognitive linguistic abilities and writing performance (r =.58 p <.001), and between syntactic awareness and writing performance (r =.55 p <.001).A combined multiple-correlation was also strong (R = .67).Findings support an integrated view of EFL writing in which conceptual processing and syntactic knowledge jointly shape quality, with implications for task design, explicit strategy instruction, and assessment practices in Iraqi higher education.
Ahmed et al. (Thu,) studied this question.