Teaching English to Kurdish Students with Special Educational Needs: Challenges and Solutions

The present study aims to investigate teaching English language to Kurdish students with special educational needs in Sulaimani city. The study focuses on the challenges that the teachers and students with special need face in teaching/learning English. Furthermore, the researchers designed two different tools to collect data: an interview for the teachers of English language and a questionnaire to be answered by the students with special needs. The data is collected from Runaki Institute and Hiwa Institute in Sulaimani city during the academic year 2022-2023. Moreover, mixed-method research is used in this study. The quantitative collected data is analyzed using SPSS, meanwhile thematic analysis is used to analyze the qualitative data. The results show that there are many challenges of teaching English to students with special needs which are relevant to curriculum, shortage of resources, lack of teaching training courses, and so on. Finally, the study presents some possible solutions to overcome the challenges facing students and teachers; the solutions are limited to designing special curriculum for English, conducting different training courses by the national and international experts, setting classes in a special way so that the students can get benefit from, and treating each student as an individual.