The speech act of refusals has been studied widely either alone or in relation to such areas as apology, requests, promotion, and invitation. The present study aims to investigate the strategies employed by Iraqi females in refusing marriage proposals. It attempts to explore their preferences to respond directly or indirectly in relation to their ages and educational background of the parents. The sample of the study consists of 25 participants; they are learners of English as a foreign language (EFL) at the College of Education for Women/ University of Baghdad. The data are collected by using a discourse completion task (DCT) followed by a follow up interview. The researchers used a Google form shared via emails to get responses from the participants. The items of the completion task are mainly designed by the researchers after surveying the literature so as to have the situations in the final shape. Beebe’s et al. (1990) taxonomy is selected as the most comprehensive modal for the analysis of refusal strategies of the respondents. The results indicated that the Iraqi females tend to use more indirect strategies to refuse the marriage proposals. The most frequently used order of responses began with an apology followed by gratitude and then the reason for refusal, as a typical Iraqi way of expressing their refusal. Based on the fact that the study sample are EFLs, there were signs of pragmatic failure as some of the responses carry some negative transfer, thus, the researchers recommend that future studies have to focus on teaching the methods of refusing appropriately by incorporating the teaching of speech acts, including the speech act of refusals, with more details in their Bachelor Program.
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
... Show MoreThe current research aims to examine the willingness to communicate and psychological adjustment of Iraqi EFL undergraduate students. To achieve the main aim, a sample of 100 male and female Iraqis’ undergraduate students studying English as a foreign language was chosen randomly from two different public colleges in Baghdad city for the academic year 2023-2024. Two scales have five Likert alternatives of 17 and 16 items developed by McCroskey & Richmond (1990) and Wais (2010), respectively were administered to the research sample to collect the needed data. The results revealed that Iraqi EFL undergraduate students have a willingness to communicate in the English language. Iraqi EFL undergraduate students have a good level of
... Show MoreEuphemisms 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
... Show MoreA 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)
... Show MoreThe 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
... Show MoreCriticism, as an evaluative criterion, is a significant speech act for English language learners to improve their speech and actions in their academic life. Yet, it is realized differently across diverse cultures. Few studies have shown that the linguistics forms of one language are different from those available in another language. Hence, this study aims to investigate the cross-cultural similarities and differences between 60 Iraqi and Malay university learners in the use of criticism strategies. The data are collected using a Discourse Completion Test (DCT) and a Focus Group Interview (FGI). The data are coded based on Nguyen’s (2005) coding scheme of criticism in terms of the realization strategies. Qualitative
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The present study discusses the problem based learning in Iraqi classroom. This method aims to involve all learners in collaborative activities and it is learner-centered method. To fulfill the aims and verify the hypothesis which reads as follow” It is hypothesized that there is no statistically significant differences between the achievements of Experimental group and control group”. Thirty learners are selected to be the sample of present study.Mann-Whitney Test for two independent samples is used to analysis the results. The analysis shows that experimental group’s members who are taught according to problem based learning gets higher scores than the control group’s members who are taught according to traditional method. This
... Show MoreThis 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
The present study discusses the problem based learning in Iraqi classroom. This method aims to involve all learners in collaborative activities and it is learner-centered method. To fulfill the aims and verify the hypothesis which reads as follow” It is hypothesized that there is no statistically significant differences between the achievements of Experimental group and control group”. Thirty learners are selected to be the sample of present study.Mann-Whitney Test for two independent samples is used to analysis the results. The analysis shows that experimental group’s members who are taught according to problem based learning gets higher scores than the control group’s members who are taught according to traditional method. This
... Show More