The Contribution of Etymological Explanation on EFL Learners' Comprehension of Proverbs and Sayings

The importance of multi-word lexical units has always been stressed and regarded as a controversial issue in both first and second language acquisition research (Richards and Rodgers, 2001). Acquiring these prefabricated utterances requires language learners to go beyond a simple word-by-word comprehension strategy and should integrate figurative meaning into contextual information (Cornoldi & Colpo, 1998). This study aimed to investigate the effectiveness of etymological explanation on Iranian EFL learners’ comprehension of proverbs and sayings. To achieve this purpose, a sample Interchange Placement Test (Richards, 2005) was administered and 60 homogeneous male and female participants selected from among a population of 96 learners at advanced level. Then they were randomly divided into male and female experimental groups (G1 and G2) and male and female control groups (G3 and G4). During the process of teaching, the four groups were given the same learning materials but with different instruction. Experimental groups (G1 and G2) were treated with an etymological explanation which helps them raise their awareness by tracing back to original usages of proverbs, while both male and female control groups (G3 and G4) were given a traditional learning approach in which they were just provided with figurative meaning of proverbs and sayings without alluding to their origins. The t-test was run and the participants' mean scores was calculated in four groups. The results indicated that the mean scores of participants provided with the etymological elaboration (G1 and G2) were much more than those who did not receive this treatment. It indicated that etymological explanation enhanced the learners comprehension of proverbs and sayings considerably. The t-test also showed that there was a significant difference between male and female experimental groups on posttest performance and male experimental group performed better than that of female group

کلیدواژه ها:

comprehension ، saying ، proverb ، etymology