Grasping the meaning of
second language idioms
Sophia Skoufaki
sskouf@essex.ac.uk
Department of Language and Linguistics
University of Essex
Outline of the talk
What are idioms?
 Why should second language teachers care
about idiom learning?
 Can second language learners remember
idioms better if they first infer their meaning
than if they are first given their meaning?
 Brief summary of a study of mine as an
example of such research.
 Possible implications for teaching.

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What is an idiom?
Flip one’s lid
put someone up,
take something down
Render onto Cesar
flip one’s lid,
kick the bucket
Birds of a feather flock together,
Too many cooks spoil the broth
*He was kicking the bucket
He was lying low
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Something that all idioms share

Compare ‘wooden table’ with ‘kick the
bucket’
‘wooden table’ = wooden + table
‘kick the bucket’ ≠ kick + the + bucket

“Non-compositionality” (of meaning)
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Why should second language teachers
care about idiom learning?
Mastery of idioms is seen as a sign of
near-nativeness.
 Idioms and other multi-word expressions
are useful to learners as they fill gaps in
their speech.

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Guessing at an idiom’s meaning
First proposed by Irujo (1984) as a
vocabulary-learning strategy
 Arguments for it:

 Students
will be able to learn more idioms than those
that teachers have time to teach in class (Irujo 1984).
 The more difficult (‘deep’) the thinking that occurs
during learning, the higher the chances that the idiom
will be remembered (Lennon 1998).
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A more specific suggestion
Inferring idiom meaning with the help
of meaning clues

Boers, Eyckmans and Stengers (2006) gave
clues about the etymology of idioms (e.g.,
building, gardening, sports) to learners and saw
whether this task led to better learning than
guessing without any clues.
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Skoufaki (2008): A study using metaphorical
clues to help idiom-meaning inference

Theoretical background:
Some idioms seem to be related to some
recurrent metaphorical patterns
 ‘take
the high road’, ‘fall from grace’, ‘look
down on someone’ - Moral goodness as
being up
 ‘be squeaky clean’, ‘do the dirty on someone’
- Moral goodness as cleanliness
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Research question

Will language learners remember idioms
better if they guess at their meaning with
the help of metaphorical clues than if they
are given their meaning up front?
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Learners and idioms
20 Greek students at the University of
Athens attending classes for the CPE
examination.
 Verb phrase idioms about morality and
comprehension (e.g., ‘come to grips with
something’, ‘something dawns on
someone’) which can be seen as related
to more general metaphorical patterns.

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Learners were asked to…
Group 1
Group 2
read idioms presented in groups
according to their related
metaphorical ideas and
including their definitions and
sentences illustrating their
meaning
read these idioms presented in
groups according to their related
metaphorical ideas and write what
they guessed each expression
meant on the basis of the cues they
were given by the metaphoric titles
a) read texts with all the idioms
and b) jot down their answers to
questions each of which
included one of the taught
expressions
i) do a cloze test where parts of
some of the idioms were missing
and ii) answer questions, each
containing one of the idioms
taught.
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Results and Conclusions

Group 2 got significantly higher scores than
Group 1 in the cloze test.


This result indicates that inferring an idiom’s meaning
with the help of metaphoric clues is more effective
than just trying to memorise an idiom presented in
relation to a metaphoric association.
The number of correct answers given to the
meaning-retention questions did not differ
significantly between the two Groups.

This result agrees with other studies claiming that the
retention of the meaning of new words is not higher
when students are encouraged to guess at the new
vocabulary’s meaning than when being supplied with
it.
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Pedagogical considerations





Conclusions about the effectiveness of the assisted idiommeaning guessing method in actual teaching contexts
should be drawn with caution.
This task is time-consuming, so it would be appropriate
only as homework.
A disadvantage of this method is that increased failure to
guess at the meanings of idioms correctly could
demotivate some learners.
How much a student can benefit from guessing at an
idiom’s meaning with the help of a metaphoric clue
depends on how much (s)he can think in terms of
metaphors and/or language in general.
It is unclear how many idioms can be linked to this kind of
general metaphoric patterns.
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References

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

Boers, F., Eyckmans, J. and Stengers, H. 2006. Presenting figurative
idioms with a touch of etymology: More than mere mnemonics?
Language Teaching Research 11 (1): 43-62.
Irujo, S. 1984. The Effects of Transfer on the Acquisition of Idioms in a
Second Language. Ph.D. dissertation, Department of Education, Boston
University. UMI.
Lennon, P. 1998. Approaches to the teaching of idiomatic language.
International Review of Applied Linguistics 36 (1): 11-30.
Skoufaki, S. 2008. Conceptual metaphoric meaning clues in two L2 idiom
presentation methods. In Boers, F. and Lindstromberg, F. (eds) Cognitive
Linguistic Approaches to Teaching Vocabulary and Phraseology, 101132. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
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Thank you!
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