Idioms in Context: an Investigation into Pragmatic Acquisition and Idioms

Madi Collins, Anthony Delsanter, Ryan Wozniak

Curation Project Presentation,

LT 538

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Agenda

Introduction: Idiom Learning

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Why does this matter?

Overview of Sources

Discussion of Theme – Solidarity

• Idioms can serve four main purposes according to Handford & Koester (2010)
• create intimacy
• express an evaluation
• demonstrate intensity
• organize discourse
• Idioms can create +/- solidarity (Bell & Healey (1992), Handford & Koester (2010))
• gender-focused study → context focused study
• intimacy can signal familiarity
• Idioms + metaphorical as a way to mitigate face threats (Handford & Koester (2010))
• “soften the blow”, more implicature

Discussion of Theme – Multilingualism

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• Idioms serve as a means of cross-cultural exchange as a degree of cultural knowledge is required in teaching and understanding idioms (Alhaysany 2017).
• Can lead to solidarity.
• Can deepen the understanding of the target language’s community.
• Saliency of idioms with respect to the target language’s culture can adversely affect acquisition (Boers and Stengers 2008).
• The larger the saliency divide seen between the learner’s L1 and learner’s TL, the less urgent the idiom (or similar idioms) is treated.
• Acquisition and Retention
• This may further inform pedagogical decisions when considering how to introduce and scaffold idioms and other abstract language concepts.
• Less salient → More salient.

Discussion of Theme– Transfer

• Second language learners encounter such difficulty using English idioms that they often prefer to avoid them altogether. This difficulty may result from confusing part of an idiom they have heard but not mastered in English, as in the case of to go out on a stick instead of to go out on a limb. It may also be the result of transferring part of an idiom in their first language to an English idiom, as in the case of to spread the voice instead of to spread the news (from the Spanish correr la voz, "to run the voice"). When the first and second language have identical idioms, the use of transfer can result in a correct idiom, such as to take the bull by the horns (the Spanish idiom agarrar al toro por los cuernos is identical in form and meaning). (Irujo, 1986)
• For example, is I am filled up a confusion of filled and fed (I am fed up was the expected English idiom), or is it the result of interference from the different but equivalent Spanish idiom estoy hasta la coronilla ("I am up to the crown of my head," with being "up to the crown of your head" meaning that you are filled up)? (Irujo 1986)
• Pretraining by decreasing task difficulty enhanced initial learning but not retention and transfer. Again, initial performance was better when participants were trained with L2 cues, but this did not lead to better delayed retention and transfer. (Steinel, Hultstijn, & Steinel 2007)
• Transparency might be expected to have a greater facilitating influence on performance when receptive knowledge is tested. The more the literal and the figurative meanings of an idiom are felt to be related, the likelier it might be that one can decipher the figurative meaning of the idiom, basing one's interpretation on the clues that the literal meaning might make available. (Steinel, Hultstijn, & Steinel 2007)
• The easiest idioms to learn are those that have exact counterparts in the learner’s mother tongue, and the most difficult idioms are those that have no analogue in L1 and whose meaning cannot be derived from the combined meaning of their constituents words Alhaysony (2017)
• Idiom access is normally "completed more quickly because it does not require the lexical, syntactic, and semantic processing required for full linguistic analysis. Thus, familiar idioms will be understood more quickly than comparable literal expressions (Cooper 1999)

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When and why do we use idioms?

Idiom Usage

When and why do we use idioms? How can we help learners to recognize these contexts and apply idioms appropriately?

Idiom Usage

Activity

• Focused on 1 context – Accepting/Refusing Work Projects
• Complex nature of idioms + gaps in pragmatics-related research = activity for building skills around these ideas
• Instructor introduces idioms and strategies → students explore
• Youglish: type in a word/phrase, and it gives you YouTube videos of the word/phrase in context
• exploration around contexts moves into a think-pair-share
• Discussion moves into practice of different situations
• ie: coworkers and accepting work, boss and worker and refusing work, etc
• Practice moves into self and peer reflection
• feedback for both the Ss and T
• Building skills and awareness of idioms in contexts

Limitations

Further Directions

Questions?

Alhaysony, M. H. (2017). Strategies and difficulties of understanding English idioms: A case study of saudi university efl students. International Journal of English Linguistics, 7(3), 70. https://doi.org/10.5539/ijel.v7n3p70

Amer, M. (2014). Language Learners’ Usage of a Mobile Learning Application for Learning Idioms and Collocations. CALICO Journal, 31(3), 285–302. http://www.jstor.org/stable/calicojournal.31.3.285

BELL, & HEALEY, J. G. (1992). Idiomatic Communication and Interpersonal Solidarity in Friends’ Relational Cultures. Human Communication Research, 18(3), 307–335. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2958.1992.tb00555.x

Bromley, K. D. (1984). Teaching Idioms. The Reading Teacher, 38(3), 272–276. http://www.jstor.org/stable/20198758

Boers, Frank and Stengers, Hélène. "A quantitative comparison of the English and Spanish repertoires of figurative idioms". Cognitive Linguistic Approaches to Teaching Vocabulary and Phraseology, edited by Frank Boers and Seth Lindstromberg, Berlin, New York: De Gruyter Mouton, 2008, pp. 355-374. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110199161.3.355

Cieślicka, A. (2015). Idiom Acquisition and Processing by Second/Foreign Language Learners. In R. Heredia & A. Cieślicka (Eds.), Bilingual Figurative Language Processing (pp. 208-244). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/CBO9781139342100.012

Cooper, T. C. (1999). Processing of Idioms by L2 Learners of English. TESOL Quarterly, 33(2), 233–262. https://doi.org/10.2307/3587719

Handford, & Koester, A. (2010). “It’s not rocket science”: metaphors and idioms in conflictual business meetings. Text & Talk, 30(1), 27–51. https://doi.org/10.1515/TEXT.2010.002

IRUJO. (1986). Don’t put your leg in your mouth: Transfer in the acquisition of idioms in a second language. TESOL Quarterly, 20(2), 287–304.

Liu, D. (2003). The Most Frequently Used Spoken American English Idioms: A Corpus Analysis and Its Implications. TESOL Quarterly, 37(4), 671–700.

Moreno, Vega. (2005). Idioms, transparency and pragmatic inference. UCL Working Papers in Linguistics, 17: 389–425, 2005. 25.

https://www.phon.ucl.ac.uk/home/lexprag07/pubs/Rosa%20Vega-Moreno%20Idioms,%20transparency%20and%20pragmatics.pdf

Moreno, V. (2007). Creativity and convention the pragmatics of everyday figurative speech. John Benjamins Pub.

Moseley, T. F. (1890). LEARN IDIOMS BY USING THEM. American Annals of the Deaf, 35(1), 14–19. http://www.jstor.org/stable/44627174

Nunberg, G., Sag, I. A., & Wasow, T. (1994). Idioms. Language, 70(3), 491–538. https://doi.org/10.2307/416483

Steinel, M. P., Hulstijn, J. H., & Steinel, W. (2007). SECOND LANGUAGE IDIOM LEARNING IN A PAIRED-ASSOCIATE PARADIGM: Effects of Direction of Learning, Direction of Testing, Idiom Imageability, and Idiom Transparency. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 29(3), 449–484.

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