Improving speaking skills of Iraqi EFL students was the main purpose of the current research. Thirty EFL students were selected as the research participants for achieving this aim. All students completed the pretest and then spent the next 25 weeks meeting for 90 minutes each to present their nine lectures, answer difficult questions, and get feedback on their use of language in context. Progressive-tests, posttests and delayed post-tests followed every three courses. The researcher utilized SPSS 22 to anal Analyze the data descriptively and inferentially after doing an ANOVA on repeated measurements. It has been shown that using the ideas of sociocultural theory in the classroom has an important and positive impact on students of

Understanding breaking news necessitates a special attention, since they are written with a special style. The study aims at identifying the difficulties faced by the Iraqi university EFL learners in comprehending English breaking news. The study included 10 fourth year students enrolled at the Department of English, College of Education for Humanities, University of Anbar. Thus, a questionnaire as a research instrument, was sent online to the students. The questionnaire points were related to the identification of difficulties faced by the learners in comprehending English breaking news. The data of the study were (10) headlines selected purposively from Euronews website. The data were qualitatively analyzed based on quantifying the qua

Learning a foreign language is a highly interactive process, and a belief that communicative activities foster a great amount of linguistic production provides language practice and opportunities for negotiation of meaning during communicative exchanges. Thus, this study examines what benefits learner-centered classroom setting offers compared with that of teacher–centered classroom, and how less proficient learners accomplish their tasks and activities with scaffolded help during interaction with the help of proficient classmates and under the guidance of a skilful person, i.e., the teacher. The subjects participating in this study are 30 Iraqi 4^th year college students in the Department of English, College of Arts , Univer

This study deals with the orthographic processing ability of homophones
which can account for variance in word recognition and production skills due to
phonological processing. The study aims at: A)Investigating whether the students
can recognize correct usage and spelling comprehension of different homophones
by using appropriate word that overlapped in both phonology and orthography.
B)Assessing spelling production word association to the written form of the
homophone in the sentence comprehension task. To achieve these aims, two tests
have been conducted and distributed on 50 students at first stage at the College of
Education(Ibn-Rushd) for the academic year 2010-2011. The two tests are exposed
to a jury of

Euphemisms are advantageous in people’s social life by turning sensitive into a more acceptable ones so that resentful feelings and embarrassment can be avoided. This study investigates the ability of Iraqi English learners in using euphemistic expressions, meanwhile, raising their awareness and the faculty members in English teaching faculties regarding the relevance of discussing the topics that demand euphemisation. This study comprised three stages: initial test, explicit instruction with activities, and a final test for the students’ development in this domain. A test has been distributed among 50 respondents, who are at the fourth year of their undergraduate study at the University of Babylon/ College of Basic Education. The lo

A reduplicative word is an important phenomenon in all language studies because it reflects many functions in language communication such as plurality, emphasis, contrast, imitation.  The various instances of reduplicative words in a particular language reflect the richness and uniqueness of that language. Moreover, such variation gives insights into both culture and thought. A reduplicative word is a linguistic phenomenon found in the syntactic, morphological, phonological and semantic levels. The current study aims at investigating the illocutionary force of English reduplicative words in some selected English colloquial utterances. To achieve this aim, an analytical -pragmatic approach has been used by adopting Searle’s (1979)

In the framework of this study, the phenomenon of transfer is probed pragma-linguistically and socio-linguistically concerning marriage situations among Iraqi EFL learners. The study also strives to look at the refusal strategies most commonly employed by Iraqi female English as a foreign Language (EFL) learners compared to their counterparts, American native speakers of English. The study involved 70 female participants who answered a Discourse Completion Task (DCT), which contained ten marriage proposals to be refused. Each situation entailed refusal of a person from a higher, an equal, and lower status. The researchers adapted Beebe, Takahashi, and Uliss Weltz’s (1990) taxonomy of refusal for analyzing the data comprehensively. The

In the framework of this study, the phenomenon of transfer is probed pragma-linguistically and socio-linguistically concerning marriage situations among Iraqi EFL learners. The study also strives to look at the refusal strategies most commonly employed by Iraqi female English as a foreign Language (EFL) learners compared to their counterparts, American native speakers of English. The study involved 70 female participants who answered a Discourse Completion Task (DCT), which contained ten marriage proposals to be refused. Each situation entailed refusal of a person from a higher, an equal, and lower status. The researchers adapted Beebe, Takahashi, and Uliss Weltz’s (1990) taxonomy of refusal for analyzing the data comprehensively.

Feedback on students’ assignments can be done in many different ways. Nowadays, the growing number of students at universities has increased the burden on the instructors to give feedback on students’ writings quickly and efficiently. As such, new methods of modern online automated feedback tools, such as Hemingway app and ecree,are used to assist and help instructors. Hence, this research is an explanatory study to examine the effect of using the online automated feedback on some Iraqi EFL learners’ writings at the university level. The study comprised 60 students enrolled in an English language course at the University of Anbar. They were divided randomly into two groups, experi

The present study investigates the realization and significance of textual themes in the organizational structure of M.A theses and Ph.D. dissertations, namely: the abstracts, introductions and conclusions, since in such parts the students depend on their own expressions, styles and constructions to express different viewpoints, plans, inferences, etc. The study also investigates the similarities and differences between M.A theses and Ph.D. dissertations concerning the use of textual themes;it sets out to conduct a detailed analysis of textual themes used in such texts. In conducting such an analysis, the study adopts Halliday's (1994) approach of textual themes. The results of such an analysis have clearly shown that, in spite of the di