Impact of L2 Film Instruction and English Idiom Etymology on Iranian EFL learners’ Idiom Learning

By the emergence of new approaches to teach a second language, finding a goodmethod to teach idioms has been the main concern of some researchers (e.g., Elena& Moreno, 2001; Cook, Fazly, & Stevenson, 2007). To the researcher›s bestknowledge; few studies have been conducted to examine the effect of differentmethods of teaching idioms to EFL learners. As a result, this study was designed toinvestigate the effect of teaching the etymology of idioms and using movie clipscontaining idioms, as two methods of teaching, on the quality of L2 learners› idiomlearning. Serving this purpose, teaching idioms through their etymologies andmovie clips and also learners› attitudes toward s using such methods (throughusing questionnaires) were taken into consideration. After administering astandard language proficiency test (OPT), 90 intermediate, out of a pile of 154 L2learners, were selected and assigned to three groups randomly, two experimental(one etymology and one movie clip group) and one control group. All the groupswere given two idiom multiple-choice tests, one as the pre-test and the other oneas the post-test. In one experimental group (A), idioms were taught together withtheir etymologies and in the other experimental group (B), the same idioms weretaught by displaying movie clips containing the idioms, while the control group (C)followed the traditional class activities using synonyms and antonyms. The resultsof one-way ANOVA and post hoc tests revealed that the participants in etymologyand movie clip groups had better performance in post-test than in pretest.Moreover, the results of Chi-square revealed that, on the whole, L2 learners hadpositive attitudes towards using etymology and movie clips in idiom learning.KeyWords: Etymology, Figurative language, Fixed Expressions, Idiomaticity,Idioms, Movie clips

کلیدواژه ها:

Etymology ، Figurative language ، Fixed Expressions ، Idiomaticity ، Idioms ، Movie clips