The Effect of Using Team –Based Learning Strategy on University Students' Achievement in English Short Story

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 :


Statement of the Problem
The appearance of English as an international language is influenced by the separation of the English Language Tradition and Modern Language Tradition. English becomes the language of the world that returns to be thanks to the linguistic legacy of the British Empire, the appearance of the USA as the powerful English-speaking, and the accompaniment of the English with the industrial development and the technology of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (White ,1988:8).
Language and communication are at the soul of the human experience. The golden aim behind learning EFL is to communicate and remain proficient in English. Harmer ( 1983 :32)believes that learning a foreign language is taking place wonderfully when students are put in communicative circumstances in the target language . Therefore , for many years teachers try to find various ways to motivate learners to be competent with this aim (Kilickaya , 2006 : 1).
Short story is one of an important and enjoyable instructional subject studied by Iraqi college students at the Departments of English. Stories are as early as humanity itself. In actual life people read short stories broadly for variety of purposes. Fables ,folk tales ,fairy tales, and short stories have always been used as a means for increasing understanding of centuries, for entertaining, and instructing the people because of their narrative elements and typical form. Short story starts an inner speech in the students. They talk to themselves about the story they read and predict about the final ending of the occasions narrated in the story (Aziz , 2012 : 1-2).
Moreover , students always feel bored and have negative emotion in EFL classroom, especially when teachers use the same reading activities which do not challenge students to read beyond a text interpretation . Such activities are : silent readings , comprehension questions , fill in the gaps exercises , true-false sentences , vocabulary, and dictionary work. These reading activities do not require students to read deeply in order to answer the questions raised by themselves .On the contrary, they only have to find the correct answer and hence they became inefficient readers. "The inability in comprehending the story results from the failure in understanding the plot of the story, the characters, the vocabulary and the role of the narrator. If the students do not understand any one of the four aspects above, they will simply fail to comprehend the story. " ( Kumar ,2011 :75).
As far as the researcher knows most of college faculty complain of having such deficient readers at the various levels of Iraqi Universities. Therefore it is necessary to bring new strategies to EFL classrooms that engage students in reading activities , encourage them to express opinions and making them active learners who are able to share their opinions with their teachers . Team-Based Learning strategy (TBLS , for short)could offer the best way to minimize EFL college students passive role of the students that they may encounter in the tradition teaching, i.e.by putting them in teams , assign to them the short story text in order to make a pre-preparation before the class , engage them with a short quiz in the Readiness Assurance Test (RAT, for short)) in individual test (IRAT, for short) ) , in a team test (TRAT, for short)) and immediate feedback assessment of the short story text and making critical thinking in the application activities (Sweet and Micaelsen ,2012 : 19).
Hence, the current study attempts to investigate the effectiveness of Team-Based strategy in teaching short story for EFL university students.

Aims of the Study
This study aims to : 1. Find out the effect of 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.

Hypotheses of the Study
The following hypotheses are put forward in order to be verified throughout the experiment of the current study: 1. There is not any significant difference between the mean scores of the experimental group and that of control group in the posttest . 2. There is not any significant difference between 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.

Value of the Study
The current study is supposed to be valuable since it tries to familiarize EFL learners with the view of team work in the education field ,so as to improve their achievement in English short story .A short story usually has aims at giving a single effect with tiny description of setting and single plot. It is easy for the students of foreign language to deal with the story. The time student's begin reading a short story, they start to dwell the text and progress inquisitiveness to know what happens next. They progress a kind of affiliation with some of the characters and share their emotional responses.
The themes offered in short stories are universal like , separation, eternity, death, revenge, love, etc. They talk about shared experiences regardless of place and time. When students read a story, they are emotionally and intellectually elaborate into the fictional world of the short story and a peculiar kind of interaction takes place between them and the story. In addition the value of this study could be itemized as follows : 1-It provides the EFL college faculty with the required steps to be followed throughout the employment of TBLS , in teaching English short story. 2-It equips students with authentic instructional material through short story which increases their critical thinking , engagement, and participation . 3-It informs syllabus designers and specialists about necessary information about the role of TBLS in the process of learning and teaching EFL .

Limits of the study
This study is limited to EFL second year college students at the University of Kirkuk who are studying English short stories : " The Happy Prince " , "Cat in the Rain " and " The Open Window ",during the first course of the academic year 2016-2017 .

The Operational Definitions of Basic Terms 1.6. 1 Effect
It means the certain modification of results that students may make in their achievement in short story.

2 Team -Based learning strategy (TBLS) :
It is a careful plan that contains a lot of activities and critical thinking to engage students with the instructional materials in a new collaborative learning way for teaching English short story.

3 Short Story
It is a short fictional work written in literature. It has a complete theme but in fact it is shorter than novel.

Achievement
It is the performance of second year college students in English short story.

The concept of Team-Based Learning
The idea of team-based learning strategy is invented by the author Larry Michaelsen by the end of 1970s . He is confronted with the new pedagogical challenge from his department and college. So , he was forced to make his experimental size of his elementary course from 40 to 120 students .Therefore , he is considered as the father of TBLS (Michaelsen et al , 2002 : 5).
The learning objective in team-based learning is to make sure that students have more opportunity to solve problems by practice most of the course concepts . So that , TBLS is made to formalize students with both conceptual and procedural knowledge. TBLS classroom sometimes is spent to make sure that students master the course content , the most of class time is used for team assignments to solve the problem that students are likely to face in the future ( Michaelsen , 2008a : 7-8) . Hawkins ( 2014 :1) also states that TBLS "emphasizes the importance of individual accountability , team-work , and the application of basic , fundamental concepts in solving real world problems .

Practical Structure of Team -Based Learning Strategy
The format for TBLS is noticed under the following three primary phases . Before beginning with the three studying phases , the instructor should organize teams from five to six students based on many principles that enable him to achieve an even experience , talents and demographics to the extent teams as a whole . There are many criteria that are being used in team organizing such as previous academic experience in related course , gender , course related life experiences and ethnicity (Hawkins , 2014 : 7 ). Five to seven learners per team is the recommended size ( Yuretich . 2015 : 2 ). They stay at the same team during the semester at least in each course (Hawkins , ibid ).

Phase 1: Assigned Readings
Students of TBLS learn outside the classroom situation as alone equipping with instructional materials to deal with course aims and essential concepts. This ought to engage shortlectures , reading tasks or other exercises . It is important that learners complete this phase and come prepared to the class to start with phase 2 (Hawkins , 2014 : 7 ).

Phase 2: Readiness Assurance Process
In this phase there is a multiple choice exams , can be done under the term "Readiness Assurance Process " (Hawkins , 2014 : 2 ). Hosier (2013 : 3 ) declares that to ensure accountability for their preparation , students are given a readiness assessment test at the beginning of class , usually at the start of a new unit . Students complete their readiness assessment test first individually and then complete the same test with their team . The individual test holds them accountable to the instructor for the work done and team test holds them accountable to their teammates .
The Readiness Assurance Process is described in brief which begins with the assigned readings , individual test , team test, appeals , and ends with oral instructor feedback (sometimes called mini-lecture / clarification), as follows :

1-Individual Test :
The material contained in the preparation of class tasks is included in an individual readiness assurance test (IRAT) . This test is based on (10 -15) multiple choice questions that help the teacher to evaluate whether the learners have understood the main ideas from their readings or not . In this process the multiple choice questions test must be based on the essential concepts , not random information and to be hard enough to motivate team conversation (Michaelsen et al ,2008b : 17).

2-Team Test :
Team readiness assurance test TRAT , start sonly after the IRAT.In the classes that have small students are likely to turn their team ,but in the classes that have large students are likely to sit in their teams from IRAT to minimize the trouble when team test is beginning . The same questions in the multiple-choice test for (IRAT) are retaking for the TRAT. During TRAT, there are a lot of noisy , discussion and negotiation of the answer among students with deep understanding . The time that decided to this test is (20) minutes for (10 -15) multiplechoice questions with remaining team have (5) minutes to end this test ( Sibley et al, 2014 : 81 ).

3-Appeals Process
In this step , students are given a chance after the team test TRAT by the instructor to appeal any questions passed on the team test and refer to their appointed materials . students are allowed to do a focused re-study of the assigned readings to challenge the teacher about their responses on specific items on the group test or about confusion created by either the quality of the questions or inadequacies of the pre-class readings ( it is "open book process"). Students must convince the instructor with evidence to support this appeal . At the same time , the instructor must be listening to the learners argue with any details of the course material (Michaelsen et al 2008a : 18

4-Mini -Lecture / Clarification
This step comes directly after the appeals process and allows the teacher to clear up any misunderstanding students may have about any of the concepts presented in the readings. As a result, input from the teacher is typically limited to a brief, focused review of only the most challenging parts of the pre-class reading assignment. ( Sibley et al , 2014 : 85 ).

Phase 3: Application Activities
In this phase teams will finish in-class the tasks that encourage collaboration , advantage from the knowledge of the phase 1 (Assigned Readings) and phase 2 (Readiness Assurance Process ) , and critical thinking (Hawins , 2014 : 6). Sweet and Michaelsen (2012 :8) show that "a critical thinking attitude is a habitual willingness or commitment to engage in purposeful deliberation about claims or ideas rather than simply accepting them at face value ."

2.3Application activities and the 4 S's
At the end of the instructional activities series in TBLS, one or more assignment is used in each unit of learning with the chance to make students thinking in deepen manner by solving a problem among groups. These application activities should be worked rapidly for two things giveandtake and accountability at the beginning within groups and then between groups ( Michaelsen et al , 2008 :20).

1-Significant problem
Learners must work on a problem , question , case , or situation demonstrating concept's usefulness so they understand its impact (Sweet and Michaelsen , 2012 : 25).A trivial problem that can be done by a single person , it is not useful for whole team in the application activities , instead the problem should be complex with incomplete information to know the capacity of teams to solve this problem (Sibley , et al , 2014 : 119 ).

2.Same Problem
The students in the class as a whole are exposed to the same problem , question or case , so that they will pay attention to the way in which other groups think with the aim of course content to engage with each other(Sweet and Michaelsen , 2012 : 25).

3.Specific Choice
It requires that teams to be able to express their solution to a problem by means in easy describe choice .The specific choice of a good application activity requires that the members of the team all come to agreement on a single , obviously defined answer in light of possibly unobvious or difficult information . When teams work on a specific choice make it speedily see and compare answers between different teams . Posing the multiplechoice questions is one of the most common way to base specific choice is, only if the questions should not be minor ;that is , the problem is significant (Sibley et al, 2014 : 120).

4-Simultaneous Reports
In the last step , it needs that answers from the team as a whole are written to the class at one time . Requiring the answers in the arrangement of a specific choice gets simultaneous reporting, perhaps because it is simple to write . Simultaneous reporting promotes the accountability of the individual of teams because each team discovers its answer will be seen to all , and no team wants to stand out with an unreasonable ,quickly chosen answer because it does not put the same thought into the problem as the other team (Sibley et al, 2014 : 121).

learning English through short stories
Stories are very significant for any person in teaching or learning their mother language and they are significant in learning or teaching any foreign language (Arab , et al,1994, as cited in ,Al-Janabi ,2016 . In each language and in each culture, stories are the essential way of establishing human experience and understanding the world. The use of stories has been typical as a valuable means of increasing literacy with children ( Fisher ,2006: 2).
A short story is a part of prose fiction that is in one sitting can be read. In the 17th century, developing from former oral storytelling customs, the short story has developed to include a body of work so varied as to challenge easy portrayal. At its most archetypal the short story characters that emphases on a self-contained occurrence with a mood or "single effect". So that, short stories deal with plot, resonance, and other dynamic constituents to a distant superior degree than is typical of an anecdote , yet to a far smaller degree than a novel. While the short story is largely different from the novel, authors of both generally draw from a shared pool of literary techniques ( Wikipedia : 2010).
It is also necessary to state that TBLS could be used as an active learning strategy at the various stages of education, including colleges and schools. There are three phases in TBLS, phase one is student pre-class preparation, such as a reading assignment and recorded lecture. Phase two initiates in class with students taking individual and team readiness-assurance tests. In phase three, students work in learning teams to complete team assignments, apply course content to real-world problems, and participate in discussions within and among groups.

Experimental Design
The experimental design is the blueprint of the procedures that enable the researcher to test hypotheses by reaching valid conclusions about relationships between independent and dependent variables (Best and Kahan ,2006 : 177).
Experimental design is "a method of research in the social sciences (such as sociology or psychology) in which a controlled experimental factor is subjected to special treatment for purposes of comparison with a factor kept constant" (merriam-webster.com) The experimental design applied in this study is called "The Posttest -Only Equivalent-Group Design" , as shown in Table (2) . It includes the following steps (Best and Kahan ,2006 : 179) : 1-selecting experimental and control groups randomly, 2.managing the independent variable only to the experimental group, 3.teaching the control group the same material (English short stories) according to the traditional way, and 4.subjecting the two selected groups to a posttest.
Thus, the experimental group is taught English short stories according to the independent variable which is TBLS whereas, the control group is taught the same instructional material according to the conventional way , i.e. without using TBLS.

Population and sampling
The whole population of the present study includes 147 second year students , morning studies in the Department of English at the College of Education for Humanities /University of Kirkuk during the academic year 2016-2017.The students are grouped into three sections : (A) ,(B),and (C).Section (A) and (B) have been randomly selected to be the experimental and control groups whose total number is eighty-five. section (A) consists of forty-three students while section (B )consists of forty-two students .Thirteen students are excluded from section ( A) and twelve are excluded from section (B).Some of those students are repeaters and others are employed for the purpose of the pilot study.
After excluding students from the both sections to avoid their past experiences, thirty students have been selected from section "A" as an experimental group and thirty students from section "B" as a control group. Thus, the total number of the involved sample is sixty students who represents 40.81 percent of its original population, as shown in table (3)

Instructional Material and Students' Instruction
The material which has been taught to the experimental and control groups includes three short stories The Happy Prince , Cat in the Rain , and The Open Window. The first story The Happy Prince is narrated by Oscar Wild. It is a typical English story of the 19th century .There are two main characters in this story, the statue of the prince ,who was happy when he was alive and the other main character is the little Sallow. When the prince died ,he saw how the poor people lived and he decided as a statue to help the needy people by the Sallow helping. At the end ,the little Sallow died at the happy prince feet from the cold. After the donation all prince's jewels, his shape become ugly so that , the powerful people of the city decided to take the statue down in the river.
The second short story Cat in the Rain is written by Hemingway ,it talks about the life of American couple .They are the main characters of this story. The setting is at the hotel in Italy . This story offers George and his wife, the American couple as emotionally isolated by their own self-absorption .The husband does not consider or show any interest to his wife ,so that the wife wants to change her life as she felt boring by having a cat.
The last story The Open Window narrates by Saki. In this story , the main characters of this story are : Vera , Mr.Nuttel ,and Mrs.Sappelton .Thus, Mr.Nuttel is an old man suffering from his bad nervous .His family advised him to go to the countryside to have some rest .When he arrives to the countryside , Mr.Nuttel is received by Vera a clever girl ,she plays trick over Mr.Nuttel by telling him that her aunts and two brothers went to shooting since three years and they did not come back. Vera said that they overwhelmed in the bog .While Mr.Nuttel is talking with Mrs.Sappelton ,he saw three men coming through the open window .He felt shocked and run without a word of apology.
In the current study the three short stories The Happy Prince , Cat in the Rain , and The Open Window have been taught to the experimental and control group. The instruction of both groups of students began on the fifteenth of October 2017, and continued for twelve weeks. It ended on the sixteenth of January , 2017 . The two groups are taught the same short stories by the researcher himself , for two lectures a week .

Construction of the Posttest
An achievement test has been constructed by considering the contents and behavioural objectives of the instructional material. It consists of eight questions with thirty-one items and scored out of hundred, as shown it in table (3) . The first four questions measure students' achievement at the recognition level while the other last four questions measure students' achievement at the production level ,as shown in Appendix . The first question contains five multiple -choice items and one mark is specified for each item that encircle the correct option. Question two contains five true/ false items and scored out of five. Question three contains five items with blanks to be filled with suitable words and scored out of five .Question four contains six items in list (A) with 5 completions in list (B) and scored out of five. Question five contains five items for analyzing characters' behaviours in specific occasions and scored out of twenty-five , i.e. each item take five marks. Whereas question six demands students to write the features of the main characters in the story of "Cat in the Rain" and formulate the conflicts in the story of "The Open Window" . Question seven which requires to evaluate the theme and climax of the story " Happy Prince" is scored out of twenty and question eight which requires to discuss the role of the character on Mr. Nuttel and a little Swallow is scored out of fifteen, including writing a paragraphs.

Scoring Schema of the posttest
Testees' answers are scored out of 100 . One mark is specified for each correct item or answer and zero for each wrong answer in the first four questions , i.e. at recognition level. Whereas at the production level, five marks are specified for each correct answer and zero to each wrong answer at the fifth question. Each of the sixth and seventh questions is scored out of twenty and the eighth is scored out of fifteen marks is given, as shown in table (4).  An achievement test has been constructed , validated ,its reliability obtained, its items analyzed then applied to the two groups of the study.

Analysis of Data ,and Discussion of Results, Conclusion ,and Recommendation 4.0 Introductory Note :
The collected data have been analyzed in order to verify the following hypotheses: 1. There is not any significant difference between the mean scores of the experimental group and that of control group in the posttest . 2. There is not any significant difference between 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.

Comparison Between the Mean Scores of the Experimental Group and that of Control Group in the Posttest
The obtained mean scores of the experimental group in the posttest is 67.70 whereas that of the and control group is 61.53 . Then the t-test formula for two independent samples is used to find whether there is any significant difference between the obtained mean scores of the two groups .The computed t-value is found to be 2.60 whereas the tabulated t-value is 2.00 at the degree of freedom (58)and the level of the significance (0.05) ,as shown in table (12).This means that there is a significant difference between the achievement of the two groups, and in favour of the experimental group.
Thus , the first hypothesis which states that there is not any significant difference between the mean scores of the experimental group and that of control group in the posttest, is rejected .

Comparison between Students' Performance at the Recognition Level and that at the Production Level
The obtained mean scores of the students' performance at the recognition level in the posttest is 15.53 whereas that at the production level is 52.17. Then the t-test formula for the two independent samples is used to find whether there is any significant difference between the obtained mean scores of the two groups . The computed t-value is found to be 25.90 whereas the tabulated t-value is 2.05 at the degree of freedom (29)and the level of the significance (0.05) ,as shown in table (6).
This indicates that students' performance at the production level is better than their performance at the recognition level. Accordingly , the second hypothesis , which states that there is not any significant difference between the mean scores of the students' performance at the recognition level and that of production level in the posttest, is also rejected .

Table(6) Students' Mean Scores and T-Value of the two Levels
Recognition and Production.

Comparison Between Males' Performance and that of Females' Performance in the Posttest
The obtained mean scores of the males' performance in the posttest is 71.43 whereas that of the and females' performance is 66.56. Then the t-test formula for the two independent samples is used to find whether there is any significant difference between the obtained mean scores of the two groups . The computed value is 1.28 which is found to be lower than the tabulated value 2.05 at the degree of freedom (28)and the level of the significance (0.05) ,as shown in table (7) Hence, the third hypothesis which states there is not any significant difference in the mean scores of students' performance between males and females is accepted.

Discussion of the Results
The obtained results indicate that the students of the experimental group is significantly better than the students of the control group in their achievement in short stories. This means that team-based learning is an efficient strategy for teaching English short story.
Results of the present study are in agreement with those of Mahakaew (2010) which showed that TBLS was a dynamic tool on learners' communicative English language ability.Moreover the obtained results are in agreement with the results of Hamra and Syatriana (2012) ,Whittaker (2014), and Wanzek et al (2014) who indicated that TBLS was very effective in learning and teaching English for EFL students .Results of the current study also indicate that TBLS played the same role of efficiency on students' performance at both recognition and production levels ,for male and female students The improvement of students' achievement in English short story by using the TBLS may be due to the following reasons : 1.The EFL university students find that the TBLS is enjoyable because they could choose their own members and activities. 2.Participation in the TBLS encourages the students to familiarize themselves with the presented short stories, collaboratively. 3. Students enjoyed TBLS because it allows them to express their own opinions freely, and thus stimulate their critical thinking. 4.Team-based learning strategy presents an immediate feedback for the students when their instructor encourages the peer evaluation through group work.

Conclusions
In the light of the findings of the study , the following points are concluded : 1. Forming teams of students as a formula of collaboration has a positive effect on individual learning results. 2. Challenging and difficult assignments in the context of TBLS allow undergraduate students to increase their motivation, confidence ,skill, and to perform better than they imagined they could. 3.Team-based learning strategy is not only useful for teaching course content but also for practising problem -solving skills and group communication skills" (as it is said by Laverie, 2006). 4.Students can positively acquire course material outside of class and be seized responsible for that acquisition through the Readiness-Assurance test .
1. The collaborative TBLS shows each team member numerous ideas expressed by her/ his friends and as an outcome produced additional thinking about accessible solution substitutes. 0. Group exercises in class have helped the students to develop strategies for effective communication, managing conflict, managing personal and interpersonal stresses and better relationship management. 7. The use of TBLS is useful to improve the social interaction among students . The students share information , participate in the exercises and answer the questions freely .

Recommendations
1. In teaching English short story , teachers are advised to focus on the procedures of TBLS rather than using the traditional methods. 2.Teachers of English short story should direct their students' attention to the various elements of short story such as, characters , theme , plot and symbols. 3. Teachers of English short story should employ various instructional devices such as, charts , data show , mind mapping tool and films inside the classroom, in order to simplify the presented texts and storm their students brains . 4. Teachers of English short story should encourage the students to speak , communicate and use English language inside classroom.