INTRODUCTION

Background

Figurative idioms, whose meaning cannot always be readily derived from the usual

meaning of their constituent elements, have received considerable attention in the SLA

literature in recent years (e.g., Boers, Demecheleer & Eyckmans, 2002; Cooper, 1999;

Cornell, 1999). In a second language learning classroom, completely idiomatic teaching

will not usually be offered and required; however, all learners must be prepared to meet

the challenge of idioms occurring frequently in spoken and written English (Hoffman,

1984; Irujo, 1986b). Pollio, Barlow, Fine, and Pollio (1977) analyzed political debates,

psychology texts, novels, and psychotherapy sessions to investigate the overall use of

non-literal language. They found that “most English speakers utter about 10 million novel

metaphors per lifetime and 20 million idioms per lifetime. This works out to about 3,000

novel metaphors per week and 7,000 idioms per week” (pp. 140). Advanced L2 learners

have the advantage of target language learning, but they also have a disadvantage in not

understanding idioms of the target language which will appear in newspapers, movies,

magazines, books and daily conversations. According to Cooper (1999), idiom study

presents a special language problem for all language learners because the figurative

meaning is unpredictable.

Assumptions

This pilot study is based on the three assumptions:

1. College ESL students are advanced English learners.

2. Acquisition of idioms forms an important aspect of language learning.
3. Advanced ESL students have problems understanding and using American idioms
correctly.
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Hypothesis

The assumptions that underline this study lead us to hypothesize that the main

problem of advanced learners with understanding idioms is the figurative language of

idioms, and that explicit teaching of idioms will facilitate idiom understanding and

acquisition by ESL students.

Research Questions

Thus, the purpose of this pilot study is to examine what difficulties advanced L2

learners have in understanding idioms and how they can use the idioms correctly. What

pedagogical methods could ESL teachers use to help advanced students acquire figurative

language? Specifically, the pilot study addressed the following questions:

1. What specific problems do advanced ESL students have with understanding and

using American idioms correctly?

2. To what extent do students retain idioms after explicit teaching of figurative

expressions?

Theoretical framework

This study is based on two theoretical views of idioms as expressed by Cooper (1998

& 1999) and Sohn (2005). Cooper (1998) states that idioms are so frequently used in

spoken and written language that they require special attention in language teaching.

Therefore, explicit teaching of idioms is adopted in our pilot study. Sohn (2005) classifies

idioms and explains their morphological, lexical, semantic, and syntactic features with

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the theory of decomposable and non-decomposable. The theory states that idiomatic

expressions are difficult to explain and classify which is a great challenge to ESL

teachers. Sohn (2005) believes that although in general the meaning of idioms cannot be

derived from their constituents, some idioms are decomposable in the sense that they

show more flexibility in allowing meaning to be derived through a combination of their

constituents as in “Take into account” which means “consider”. Some others are less

flexible as seen in “kick the bucket” which means “die,” so decomposable idioms are

easier to acquire than non-decomposable ones. According to this, we chose the non-

decomposable idioms in our study which are figurative for advanced students and need

more explicit teaching to understand. Our selection and classification as well as our

strategies for teaching idioms in this study are informed by the theories of Cooper (1998)

and Sohn (2005). In the analysis of the students’ performance in this study we shall be

looking for the specific problems students would have in understanding and using idioms

correctly, how explicit teaching help students understand idioms and the extent the

students retained those idioms after explicit teaching based on this theoretical framework.

Instrument and Materials

Participants

The participants in this pilot study were six ESL students, who have studied English

as a second language for approximately14 years on average. Five of them are

undergraduate students and one is a graduate student at Iowa State University (ISU). The

detailed information about participants is set out in Table 1 according to the survey

questions answered by the students during the pre-test.

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 TABLE 1

Descriptive information on the participants (according to the survey with pre-test)

Self-
Length of studying Time spent in American or
L1 assessment
English US British English
proficiency
None of the
Thai More than 20 years 2 months Low-medium
S1 above

Thai 8 years 6 years Both 80/100

S2
Chinese 17 years 3 months Both Fluent
S3
Spanish 14 years 8 years American Close to perfect
S4
Spanish 12 years 1.5 years American Proficient
S5
Urdu, Punjabi 12 years British NA
S6 1year

All of them volunteered for our pilot study and they were expected to understand the
vocabulary in the pre-test because of their advanced level in English. Therefore, only the
figurative meaning of the idioms would be new to them, which is what we are
investigating in this study.

The Pre-test

An idiom pre-test (See Appendix 1) was developed that would be suitable for 6

participants of this proficiency level. Thirteen non-decomposable idioms were chosen

according to Sohn (2005). The test was developed as a multiple-choice format discourse

completion test (DCT), with the participants being given descriptions of situations in

which certain idiom would be used (Gass & Macker, PP. 140). After each description,

participants chose the right idiom out of four idioms provided as multiple-choice answers.

The multiple-choice format was adopted because the students were familiar with it and it

did not require writing. DCT was adopted because it helped students on idiom use in

certain situations rather than guessing from multi-word lexical chunks (Boers,
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Demecheleer & Eyckmans, 2002). Thirteen idioms made thirteen items for the test and

each item is a multiple-choice format DCT task, which includes a situation description

and a question with multiple choices. Eight survey questions (See Appendix 1) were

included after the pre-test to collect students English proficiency background and to

investigate specific problems they had during the idiom pre-test.

The Worksheet and Teaching Unit Based on Pre-test

A worksheet (See Appendix 2) with the idioms on the pre-test was given to the

students after the pre-test. Each idiom section includes a picture (obtained from various

internet sources found through Google image searches) of the literal meaning, the

metaphorical meaning and an appropriate situation for use. The picture of the literal

meaning is to give students a visual understanding of the idioms and help them retain the

idioms (Steinels, 2007). The metaphorical meaning is to explain what the idioms meant if

they are non-decomposable according to their literal meaning. An appropriate situation

for the idioms’ use part is to discuss when, where, and how to use the idioms. Meanwhile,

an idiom teaching unit was conducted right after the pre-test based on the worksheet.

PowerPoint was used in the teaching process to provide visual input of the idioms in

addition to the worksheet and the instructor discussed the three parts of the worksheet

with the students.

The Post-test

A post-test (See Appendix 3) was developed with the same format as the pre-test but

the situations and the multiple choice questions were different from the pre-test in order

to measure the acquisition of the idioms by students after explicit teaching based on the
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pre-test and to avoid memorizing multi-word lexical chunks (Boers et al. 2002) from the

pre-test. Students conducted the post-test within fifteen minutes one week after their pre-

test and explicit idiom teaching individually and were asked to write down the answer to

the question below after the post-test:

“To what extent did the explicit teaching of idioms help you understand
them better? Did it make a difference that you were taught these idioms
instead of you just trying to find the meaning by yourself?”

We wait for a week to conduct the post-test because seven days is good time-span to test

language retaining (Forgetting curve by Hermann Ebbinghaus, 1885)

Procedure

The pre-test was conducted in a classroom by giving participants fifteen minutes for

thirteen idiom-items. Fifteen minutes was adopted because the same test was finished by

the other two advanced English L2 volunteers in ten minutes. So, we extended the time to

fifteen minutes for both the pre-test and the eight survey questions which followed.

Students were informed by the instructor to choose the idiom according to what they read

from the description of the situation of each item (multiple-choice questions). All of the

students finished the pre-test in fifteen minutes and the test papers were collected without

giving the correct answers to students in order to avoid self-learning on the idioms from

the pre-test.

Then the worksheets based on idioms from the pre-test (See Appendix 2) were sent

out to students followed by a thirty minute idiom teaching unit, in which the thirteen

idioms from the pre-test were taught and discussed one by one. Notes were taken for later

data analysis. In the teaching unit, the instructor first showed the picture of the literal
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meaning of an idiom through PowerPoint to provide a visual input to the students. Then

the instructor taught the figurative meaning and appropriate situation where the idioms

were used.

The post-test was conducted by the same group of students individually a week later

in the instructor’s office. Post-test were not conducted at the same time because of the

tough schedule of the students, who were volunteers from different grades and majors.

Fifteen-minutes was given to each student to answer thirteen items and survey questions.

The results were counted by three graduate students at ISU who are all first year M.A.

students in TESL/Applied Linguistics: Elisa, Na, and Richmond. We counted the number

of correct responses for both the pre-test and the post-test and compared them in order to

investigate whether explicit teaching facilitated students’ understanding and retention of

idioms, and to what extent students retain idioms after explicit teaching.

Data Analysis/Results

The survey questions and the notes during the teaching unit were typed into a

computer and categorized (see Appendix 4 &5) in order to address our first research

question. In the process of giving picture as a visual input of the non-decomposable

idioms, students were able to recall the idioms they encountered during the pre-test but

they were not able to tell the figurative meaning of the idioms because we found students

tried to translate the literal meaning into their L1 in order to understand idioms. After

recalling the idioms from the pictures, the instructor taught the figurative meaning and

appropriate situation where the idioms were used. In this process, the most frequent

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question students raised was how and when to use the idioms. Therefore, this suggested

the answers to our first research question:

1. Advance L2 students cannot give the figurative meanings of the idioms

2. Students try to understand the idioms in their native language, and this mostly
results in negative transfer.

3. Even when they possess a fair idea of the figurative meaning of an idiom, they
lack the knowledge of the right context in which the idioms are used.

A comparison between pre-test results and post-test results was analyzed in this

study. Each correct multiple choice question is recorded as 1 and the total score of each

test is 13 if students could choose all idioms correctly. The comparison of the scores of

the pre-test to the post-test showed the improvement of understanding and retaining

idioms as in the chart below.

52%↑  

Pre‐test and Post‐test Score Contrast

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 In the pre-test the mean score is 8 and the mean score in the post-test is 12.7 which is

increased by 52%. Moreover the feedback that all six participants gave after the post-test

support the statistic improvement, such as :

“Idiom teaching helped a lot, i got to know a lot of new words. I would not have been
able to find the meanings myself that better. I think such kind of things should be taught
in the class as well” by Raja Umer (See indetailed in Appendix 5).

Thus, we can answer our second research question by saying that explicit teaching caused

a 52% increse in this pilot study, which supports that explicit teaching is effective and

successful for figurative language teaching.

Conclusion

This study investigated the problems that advanced ESL students have with the

acquisition of idioms and the extent to which they can retain idioms after explicit

teaching. The results of this pilot study revealed that advanced ESL students have

problems identifying the figurative meaning of idioms but this can be overcome by

explicit teaching of figurative language. According to the feedback from the students in

the post-test, they all attributed their understanding of figurative idioms and the increase

in their score in the post-test to the explicit teaching that they received (Appendix 5). The

results, therefore, confirm the hypothesis that explicit teaching of idioms will facilitate

their acquisition by ESL students. It also confirms that idioms are difficult for ESL

learners.

Before considering the implications of this pilot study for future study in the

classroom, this limitation is worth pointing out: the same format and similar choices of

the pre-test and post-test may be a factor to help students memorize idioms rather than
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acquiring them, which will weaken the supportiveness of explicit teaching in this study.

To solve this, an extra control group of students without the explicit teaching unit after

the pre-test should be involved and other formats of the post-test, such as writing the

narratives of the idioms could also be helpful to test retention of idioms by advanced L2

learners. Moreover, the participants of same L1 should be considered for study because

they would have similar positive or negative transfer.

Our focus in this study has been on the problems advanced ESL students have in

figurative language. Therefore, ESL teachers should be aware that figurative language

should be taught explicitly to advanced ESL students in classrooms so they could be

more confident in their L2 language study. The explicit teaching unit turned out to be

very effective in helping advanced ESL students understand and retain figurative idioms

in this study which should be considered a teaching technique and be promoted as a long-

term development of language acquisition.

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References

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strategy for learning idioms. In Bogaards, P. & Laufer, B Vocabulary in Second

Language. (2004)

Cooper Thomas. (1998). Teaching idioms. Foreign language annals, 31(2), 255 -266.

Cooper Thomas. (1999). Processing of Idioms by L2 Learners of English. TESOL

Quarterly, 33(2), 233-262.

Cornell. (1999). An Approach to Identifying Major Pitfalls for Learners IRAL,

International review of applied linguistics in language teaching, 37 (1), 1 -22.

Deignan, A. (2003) Metaphorical expressions and culture: an indirect link. Metaphor and

symbol, 18, 255-272.

Lennon, P. (1998) Approaches to the teaching of idiomatic language. International

review of applied linguistics in language teaching.

Steinel & Hulstijn (2007) Second language idiom learning in a paired-associate paradigm:

Effectis of Direction of learning, direction of testing, idiom image ability, and idiom

transparency. Studies in second language Studies in Second Language Acquisition,

29(03), 449-484.

Sohn, Jan-philipp. (2005). Uber barendienste und erstaunte Bauklotze. Idiome ohne freie

lesart in der HPSG, Phil. Dissertation, Universitart Jena.

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