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Articles

L2 learners’ recognition of unfamiliar idioms composed of familiar words

Pages 89-109 | Received 09 Feb 2015, Accepted 12 Nov 2015, Published online: 28 Dec 2015
 

Abstract

Most second language (L2) learners are aware of the importance of vocabulary, and this awareness usually directs their attention to learning new words. By contrast, learners do not often recognise unfamiliar idioms if all the compositional parts look familiar to them such as turn the corner or carry the day. College-level ESL (English as a second language) learners (n = 52) at intermediate to advanced levels of proficiency participated in a series of metalinguistic tasks designed to examine their explicit recognition of unfamiliar idioms that may only look familiar because of their familiarity with the words in the idioms. Results show that L2 learners tend to recognise unfamiliar idioms with familiar components at a significantly lower rate than they recognise unfamiliar words such as serendipitously or octogenarian. In addition, L2 learners’ definitions of idioms indicated as familiar tend to be significantly lower in acceptability than their definitions of words indicated as familiar. It is argued that, if this pattern is repeated over time, the opportunities for learning these idioms incidentally might be reduced. It is suggested that learners need to become more aware of the common presence of these idioms in language, and that leaners’ continued awareness is key to sustained acquisition of these idioms.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the voluntary participants and the ESL expert rater who generously donated their time for this project. I thank the two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. As an anonymous reviewer pointed out, it is not clear exactly what the participants meant when they chose this category. Based on the directions for the task and other available categories to choose from, what is clear, however, is that items indicated as SoundsStrange were neither ‘I know what this means’ nor ‘I do not know what this means’ in the story.

2. The source of this marginal order effect is not exactly clear. Participants might have opted for the SoundsStrange marking, which is somewhere in the middle between the Unfamiliar and Familiar markings, more often early in the task and then moved to use one or the other more indicative marking towards the end of the task. At the same time, this explanation does not account for the fact that this pattern was observed only with the idioms presented in the CRtoLI context.

3. This is somewhat surprising in that the coincidental references to the literal interpretation of the idiom components were not meant to assist participants' comprehension of the figurative meaning of those idioms. It can only be speculated that, perhaps, these coincidental references to the literal interpretation first promoted participants' literal interpretation of the entire idioms, as studies by Cieślicka (Citation2006, Citation2010, Citation2011) showed, some of which might have been modified to accommodate their figurative meanings. This is not a satisfactory explanation given that, if anything, the coincidental references were thought to make it rather more difficult for the participants to spot the idioms in the first place. At any rate, what is relevant to mention, however, is that the contexts utilised in the current study were not for the same research purposes as previous studies which examined the effect of context biasing for either the figurative or literal interpretation of idioms.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Choonkyong Kim

Choonkyong Kim is an associate professor of applied linguistics in the English Department at St. Cloud State University, Minnesota, USA. Her research interests include second language vocabulary acquisition, language assessment, and language teacher cognition.

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