It is all “English” to me: Can Cross-Culture Overlaps Facilitate L۲ Idioms Teaching?

Idioms are highly conventionalized expressions that allow users to express beyond literal meanings. Despite the language difference, counterparts of idioms may overlap cross-culturally due to similar origin, social habits, and experiences. It is therefore interesting to probe whether L۲ learners may benefit from deliberate instructions built on shared counterparts existing in both L۱ and L۲, known as cross-language overlaps. Although the phenomenon of cross-language overlap has been reported by lexical and collocation processing research (e.g., Carrol & Conklin, ۲۰۱۷; Hubers et al., ۲۰۲۰), it is yet uncertain whether its impact is influential for L۲ idiom learning with the absence of semantic or syntactical similarity. To address this gap, the current study attempted to investigate whether raising English as a foreign language learners’ awareness of cross-language overlap may facilitate L۲ idiom teaching and how such overlap-enhancement instruction may change over different congruence conditions (congruence-available and incongruence conditions) and time. The study collected L۲ idiom learning data from forty-five Chinese English learners, following a pretest-posttest design. While the experimental group (n=۲۶) learned twenty-eight target L۲ idioms with an enhancement instruction emphasizing the overlaps, the control group (n=۲۸) learned these idioms with a conventional instruction method. Findings of this study revealed that participants were able to benefit from cross-language overlaps from both conditions, and the enhancement instruction on the semantic overlaps would result in significant learning improvement.  It is therefore pedagogically advisable for language teachers to marry up L۱-L۲ idiom phrases containing similar counterparts and deliberately focus on the semantic congruency.

کلیدواژه ها:

Cross-Language Overlaps Enhancement ، L۲ idiom Teaching ، Idiom congruence ، English as Foreign Language Classrooms ، L۲ Figurativeness