Journal of Tikrit University for Humanities

Language is at the heart of human life, serving as a conduit for the exchange of ideas, interactions, and the formation of social and individual identities. Reading is one of the most critical language skills to teach. It is a fluent process in which a person combines information from a text with their own prior knowledge to create meaning. Developing metacognitive processes is a crucial subject and it is highly beneficial to language learning. The current study aims at demonstrating the effect of Question-Answer Relationships (QAR) strategy in developing students’ metacognition with regard to reading comprehension.This study mainly aims at finding out:
1.The degree to which the students' metacognitive abilities in relation to their linguistic repertoire have developed.
2. The extent to which EFL students have developed their metacognitive skills through reading comprehension by using question-answer relationship (QAR).
These requirements were achieved by confirming the following hypothesis:
1. There is no statistically significant difference between the mean scores of the experimental group's achievement and that of the control group in the posttest applying question-answer relationship (QAR) on the reading comprehension.
To verify the hypothesis of the study, a sample of 50 students have been randomly selected from the fifth preparatory grade at Al Dour Preparatory School for Boys .The sample was split into two groups: one for the experiment and the other for the control. Both of these groups are comparable in terms of their previous year's English language scores, age, and parent's educational level. The researcher used an achievement test is constructed and applied to asses evaluate the students' success in the study's dependent variable. The study lasted ten weeks. Results of this study revealed that there was a statistically significant difference between the mean scores of the EG and that of the CG in the reading comprehension achievement post test ,i.e. the scores of the students in reading comprehension in the EG was significantly higher in average than that of the students in the CG on the post test . As a result, the current study's findings verified the importance of Question Answer Relationship (QAR) in improving students' metacognition with regard to reading comprehension skills. Finally, the study ended with some conclusions and recommendations.

Stress is one of the main linguistic aspects that deals with greater effort on a syllable or syllables in a word and making them more prominent than other unstressed syllables. This phonetic and phonological feature is probably present in most languages of the world. The present study presents lexical stress patterns influence on Iraqi Arabic and Kurdish EFL learners’ pronunciation. The study aims at investigating EFL learners’ pronunciation of English lexical stress by three different language groups, to show the effect of first language on the pronunciation of English words concerning Iraqi Arabic and Kurdish EFL learners, clarifying the influence of gender on their performance. The current study hypothesizes the following for the current aim to be achieved: . there is no difference in gender in the performance of all language groups. Lastly, the validity of the data is analyzed acoustically by using Praat software program to verify the auditory analysis and to make certain that stress assignment is precise. Among the conclusions arrived at in the present study is that the total performance of Kurdish participants is better than the Iraqi Arabic performance, but there is no significant difference between them.

One of the objectives of feminism in the academia is to expose, in creative and critical resistance literature, various facets of men’s justification for the subordination of women. Resistance literature is growing as a massive body of work in the Arab region too, especially the creative and critical works by Arab women writers, and Maha Gargash’s contribution to it is commendable. The present paper examines the nature of struggle the protagonist, Noora, in Gargash’s novel The Sand Fish launches against patriarchal forces to combat her oppression. An analysis of the fictional character Noora reveals a clear-cut demarcation in the development of her philosophy of life before and after her marriage. She strongly resists patriarchal domination before her marriage, but becomes complicit in her subjugation after marriage. The issue of her complicity has been investigated with insights from Simone de Beauvoir’s analysis of the subject in The Second Sex (1949). Noora’s complicity primarily owes to her material and social situation, but existential angst is also found to be at play influencing her decisions.

This study deals with Conceptual Metaphor as a cognitive phenomenon which is the main part of our conceptual system. Metaphor is used to express and realize the abstract and complex concepts in terms of concrete ones. Conceptual Metaphor depends on the systematic mappings between the two domains .The current study presents a contrastive analysis of conceptual metaphors of temperature related expressions particularly (Coldness)in English and Arabic languages. Its main purpose is to seek the similarities and differences in the two languages. This study examines the shared and cultural-specific conceptual metaphors , and the extent to which the difference in conceptual metaphors can be related to cultural and physiological factors .The study hypothesizes the following for the aims to be achieved: (1) human tend to represent emotions by utilizing source domains that are grounded in their experience .(2) English and Arabic have similarities and differences in highlighting and utilizing temperature concepts to understand abstract domains.The main conclusions in this study are:(1) English and Arabic have similarities in conceptual metaphors .The reason behind these similarities is because they are embodied and grounded in human’s experience .(2) There are certain differences in both languages in conceptualizing certain target domains due to cultural differences.

This present paper discusses the symbolism and allegory in Lord of the Flies. This novel reveal what happens to civilization in isolation, so, civilization turns into savagery when rules are not followed. Symbolism, Ralph stands for democracy and civilization, while Jack stands for dictatorship and savagery. Allegorically, Ralph represents goodness and Jack represents the evil.
This study explains the significance of the allegory and the symbols by revealing elements, such as characters, setting, plot, and conflict. The symbols are associated with characters and setting, while the allegory is associated with the plot and conflict between good and evil.