Strategies and Difficulties of Understanding English Idioms: A Case Study of Saudi University EFL Students

Maha H Alhaysony

doi:10.5539/ijel.v7n3p70

Abstract

This study aims to investigate difficulties face Saudi EFL students in learning and understanding English idioms, and examines the strategies they utilize to understand idioms. The subjects were 85 male and female Saudi English major university students at the Department of English in Aljouf University. Two data collection instruments, questionnaire, semi-structured interview were employed as well as the Nation’s Vocabulary Level Test to measure the students’ language proficiency level. The results showed that students have difficulty to understand idiomatic expressions. Moreover, the findings revealed that most frequently used strategies were guessing the meaning of idioms from context, predicting the meaning of idioms, and figuring out an idiom from an equivalent one in their mother language. Furthermore, the results illustrated that low-proficiency students face more difficulties than high-proficiency students, though the differences were not significant. The results also showed that, the greater the vocabulary knowledge, the greater the use of idiom-learning strategies, especially for idioms that require a wider knowledge in vocabulary. This study concludes with teaching implications and recommendation for further research in learning and understanding idiomatic expressions.

Highlights

Brown (2001) stated that vocabulary is considered to be “the building block of language” (p. 377) and that it deserves that teachers should allocate specific class time, as vocabulary learning is a priority if one needs to communicate productively
What sort of difficulties do Saudi EFL students encounter in learning idioms?
The first subsection concerns the difficulties that Saudi EFL students encounter while learning English idioms, and the second one concerns the strategies they use to facilitate their learning and understanding of English idioms

Summary

Introduction

Brown (2001) stated that vocabulary is considered to be “the building block of language” (p. 377) and that it deserves that teachers should allocate specific class time, as vocabulary learning is a priority if one needs to communicate productively. Investigating how idiomatic expressions are dealt with and processed in L2 is an issue worth examining further, since it could give language teachers a better idea of the difficulties that L2 learners face in understanding English idioms. It could illuminate some of the strategies that language learners use in order to find out the meaning of unknown idioms and to interpret figurative language. It seems that teachers and students have not given them much attention

Objectives

Methods

Results

Conclusion