Understanding The Cognitive Domain Of The Pashto Learners
According to the Foreign Services Institute (FSI), Pashto language is linguistically and culturally considered significantly different from English and is placed in category four with regards to its level of difficulty for an English speaker (FSI, 2011). It requires eleven hundred class hours or forty-four weeks to reach to a General Professional Proficiency level 3 in speaking (S3) and reading (R3) (FSI, 2011).
For an English speaker, Pashto can be very difficult to learn because of a variety of reasons. These problems may include grammatical structure, limited vowels, strange alphabets, Arabic writing script, drastic cultural differences, etc. To address this issue, one need to understand what are the real difficulties/problems for an English speaker to learn Pashto language? An exploratory approach is needed to find out the most salient problems involved in Pashto learning.