Abstract
This paper primarily focused on the description of the results of a study conducted with sixty Iranian adult EFL learners to investigate how the reading strategies and pragmatic elements are likely to govern and characterize the comprehension and interpretation process of English idioms with and without contextualized reading. It also intended to determine the role of cultural mappings and the extent to which Iranian EFL learners' knowledge of cultural idioms is affected by their L1 when they try to construct their own meanings. The researchers came up with some interesting inferences about such theme-based patterns of idiomatic expressions through descriptive statistics and analysis of the participants' metacognitive comments in four phases of the study.
Highlights
Background of the StudyIdioms make up a large proportion of any discourse, and the comprehension and production of them are the main parts of the studies of idiomaticity in both first and the second language literature
Some scholars such as Cronk and Schweigert identified familiarity and literalness as measurable indications for the computation and representation of idiomatic meaning in the mental lexicon; others such as Botelho da Silva and Cutler studied the role of ill-formedness in idiom processing while the case of ambiguity and the relationship between context and different types of idioms was the main interest of others. (McGlone et al 1994)
In the second model called lexical representation hypothesis (Swinney & Cutler,1979), idioms are considered to be long words that are stored in the mental lexicon along with all other words and both the literal and the figurative meanings of the expressions are processed simultaneously, which results in a "horse race" in which the context determines the more fitting interpretation
Summary
Background of the StudyIdioms make up a large proportion of any discourse, and the comprehension and production of them are the main parts of the studies of idiomaticity in both first and the second language literature. A number of studies conducted in the 1990s (e.g.,Cronk and Schweigert 1992; Colombo 1993; Botelho da Silva and Cultler 1993; McGlone, Glucksberg, and Cacciari 1994) focused on idiom comprehension Some scholars such as Cronk and Schweigert identified familiarity and literalness as measurable indications for the computation and representation of idiomatic meaning in the mental lexicon; others such as Botelho da Silva and Cutler studied the role of ill-formedness in idiom processing while the case of ambiguity and the relationship between context and different types of idioms was the main interest of others. In the second model called lexical representation hypothesis (Swinney & Cutler,1979), idioms are considered to be long words that are stored in the mental lexicon along with all other words and both the literal and the figurative meanings of the expressions are processed simultaneously, which results in a "horse race" in which the context determines the more fitting interpretation. The fourth idiom-processing model, composition model (Gibbs, 1994; Tabossi & Zardon,1995), supersedes the three models described above
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