Journal of Tikrit University for Humanities

This study sets out to investigate structural metaphors in The Glorious Qur’an within the framework of conceptual metaphor theory. It represents part of our experience from a cognitive semantic perspective. Structural metaphors are used to structure and understand the abstract concepts in terms of more clear and delineated ones. Structural metaphors perform an important function when they are used in The Glorious Qur'an, in that It is characterized by Its uniqueness, style and its aesthetic and rhetoric structures. Structural metaphors play an essential role in opening new horizons for readers to understand the deeper meanings of the Qura'nic Ayas which are used metaphorically in order to give a specific significance whether intellectual, psychological or aesthetic. This study comes to investigate structural metaphors in The Glorious Qur'an. It is hypothesized that structural metaphors are commonly used in The Glorious Qur'an. Structural metaphors are used in The Glorious Qur'an to facilitate the understanding of abstract concepts in terms of concrete ones. It is also hypnotized that the use of structural metaphors in The Glorious Qur'an is meant to meet specific rhetorical meanings.

Impoliteness is a linguistic aspect that has been seen as an opposite in orientation to politeness. It is unpleasant and rather minor in conversations. Nevertheless it is central and important in some discourses as in drama. The use of impoliteness in dramatic dialogue, especially in historical data, is important to know the social fabric of a society at that time. This study focuses on the investigation of impoliteness in historical data; a Restoration comedy entitled The Plain Dealer (1676) by William Wycherley. The current study also focuses on other functional types of impoliteness which are: affective impoliteness, coercive impoliteness and entertaining impoliteness.

This study aims to:
1. Find out the effect of Team-Based Learning strategy (TBLS) on university students' achievement in English short story.
2. Find out whether there is any significant difference between students' achievement at the recognition level on one hand, and their achievement at the production level, on the other hand .
3. Find out whether there is any significant difference between the achievement of male students and that of females in English short story.
The following hypotheses have been formulated in order to be verified :
1. There is not any significant difference between the mean scores of the experimental group and that of the control group in the post -test .
2. There is not any significant difference in the mean scores of students' performance at the recognition and production levels.
3. There is not any significant difference in the mean scores of students' performance between males and females, in the posttest .
The sample of this study consists of sixty EFL second-year students that represents 40.81 percent of its original population and divided into two equal groups. To fulfill the aims of this study an experiment has been designed .
The two groups have been taught the same instructional material (short stories)for a period of twelve weeks. The experimental group has been taught according to the TBLS , while the control group has been taught according to the traditional way. An achievement test has been constructed , validated ,and applied to the two involved groups.
The required data has been collected and analyzed statistically .The obtained results are as follows:
1. There is a significant difference between the achievement of the two groups, and in favour for the experiment group.
2. The students' performance at the production level is better than their performance at the recognition level.
3. There is not any significant difference in the mean scores of students' performance between male and female students.
This indicates that TBLS is more effective than using the traditional way for teaching English short stories .
Finally , the study ends up with a number of conclusions , recommendations and suggestions.