Journal of Tikrit University for Humanities

Evaluation plays an enormous role in the teaching-learning process. It helps teachers and learners to improve teaching and learning. Evaluation is a continuous process and a periodic exercise. In learning, it contributes to formulation of objectives, designing of learning experiences and assessment of learners’ performance. It is very useful to bring improvement in teaching and curriculum. It also provides accountability to the society, parents, and to the education system.A teacher-made test is one of the most valuable instruments in the hands of the teacher to achieve his purpose. It is designed to solve the problem or requirements of the class for which it is prepared and to measure the outcomes and content of local curriculum. It is very much flexible so that, it can be adopted to any procedure and material. It does not require any sophisticated technique for preparation. This study aims at: 1- identifying a set of criteria for efficient English teacher-made tests. 2- evaluating English teacher-made tests of the fifth preparatory class in the light of the criteria developed. The following procedures are followed in order to achieve these aims: 1.Designing a checklist which includes the most important criteria of efficient tests, namely: validity, reliability, practicality (scorability) and accuracy. 2-Selecting a sample of eighteen teacher-made tests for the fifth preparatory class.

Lately, pragmatics has attracted the attention of linguists and philosophers. It has been integrated into many fields of study that have contributed to the study of language. A debate is a special form of an argumentative dialogue in which two or more parties take part in attacking and defending certain claims through reasoned discourse. This study has set itself to pragmatically analyze and evaluate selected arguments of religious debates. Islamic-Christian debates are specifically chosen as data for the current study because they have not received due attention in language studies. This study is essentially concerned with investigating the logical pragmatics in the context of Deedat-Swaggart’s debate. Consequently, the study aims at: identifying the most frequently utilized logical pragmatics strategies; showing whether the pragmatic criteria are frequently kept to or violated. To fulfill the aims, it is hypothesized that debaters utilize certain logical pragmatics strategies (grounds, warrants, claims, backings, qualifiers, and rebuttals, certain types of reasoning, and argumentation schemes), the pragmatic criteria are frequently violated. The study employs a mixed method (qualitative and quantitative) to analyze the data and to verify or reject the hypotheses. The results of the study reveal that the most frequent pragmatic strategies utilized by Deedat are: grounds, deductive reasoning, argument from expert opinion. Swaggart, on the other hand, highly employs: grounds, presumptive reasoning, argument from expert opinion. The results have also shown that Deedat’s chains of arguments are stronger and more persuasive than Swaggart’s in terms of satisfying the logical criteria of argument evaluation.

This study deals with the prototype theory of categorization from a cognitive perspective by applying it to the famous American ''Family Feud '' and Iraqi '' 'A'ialti Turbah" TV shows. It examines cognitive Linguistics and its main principles. The cognitive process of categorization enables people to classify events , information , and objects that they meet in their region . It is worth mentioning that the current study is a new trend in analyzing the questions of the two shows by pointing the prototype and the factors or reasons that form the prototype. Hence , it aims at finding out the reasons or criteria that form the typical category member in different areas or countries. This study hypothesizes that prototypes formation process is influenced by the social contexts where prototypes are used . Prototypes are not one hundred percent agreed upon in a society. Each culture has its own prototype( the most representative member of a category) depending on different factors.

The current paper addresses itself to scrutinize the phenomenon of Al-Tadhaad 'one word with two opposite meanings' with reference to Arabic-English translation. It goes undeniable that Al-Tadhaad is based on the investigation of the opposite meanings of one word. Furthermore, in Arabic, Al-Tadhaad is dramatically different from antonymy and polysemy in English. Antonymy is mainly concerned with the oppositeness of two independent words such as big/ small, fast/ slow, etc. As for polysemy, it is restricted to the different and related meanings of one word. So, English lacks even the convenient terminology for such phenomenon. This study verifies that the phenomenon of Al-Tadhaad is widely utilized in the Glorious Quran and generally in the Arabic books.