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Difficulties Facing Iranian EFL Senior High School Learners and Strategies They Use to Understand English Idioms

Paper · 2018 · Vahid Shahidipour and Mohammad Hassan Tahririan

Summary

Idioms are a known obstacle for learners of English as a foreign language because their figurative sense cannot be worked out from the words they contain. This study looks at Iranian senior high school students and asks three questions. Which obstacles do they report when trying to understand idioms? Which learning strategies do intermediate learners rely on? Do stronger and weaker idiom readers differ in how they use strategies? Two hundred students from schools in Qom filled in a five-point Likert questionnaire on idiom difficulties (Alhaysony, 2017). After the Oxford Quick Placement Test, 98 intermediate learners also took a researcher-built multiple-choice idiom test and completed Oxford's Strategy Inventory for Language Learning. The data were analysed with descriptive statistics and a one-sample t-test. Students attributed their trouble mainly to idioms being poorly taught in class and missing from the syllabus. Successful learners used all six strategy groups, with metacognitive strategies most frequent and affective ones least. Their strategy use differed significantly from that of less successful peers. The authors argue that idioms should be taught explicitly in Iranian EFL materials and lessons.

Key points

  • The sample was 200 male and female senior high school students in Qom, aged 14–18, chosen by convenience sampling. Of these, 98 intermediate learners were selected with the Oxford Quick Placement Test for the strategy analysis.
  • Three instruments were used: a Likert questionnaire on idiom challenges (Alhaysony, 2017), a researcher-written multiple-choice test of idiom comprehension, and Oxford's 1990 SILL questionnaire measuring the use of language learning strategies.
  • Strategies follow Oxford's six categories. Memory, cognitive and compensation strategies are direct; metacognitive, affective and social strategies are indirect. Among successful learners, metacognitive use was highest (M = 3.88) and affective use lowest (M = 2.84).
  • The main reported difficulties were that idioms are not taught well and are not part of the course syllabus. The national Vision textbooks introduced only a few figurative expressions from 2016, for example fourteen in the last lesson of Vision 3.
  • Better performance on the idiom test went with heavier use of direct strategies (reasoning, analysing, translating, transferring, intelligent guessing) together with metacognitive self-evaluation.

Interesting ideas

  • I1. The study first filters participants by proficiency and only then compares successful and less successful idiom readers, so that general language level does not hide strategy differences.
  • I2. The literature review sorts multiword units into core idioms (fully non-compositional), figuratives (metaphor-based) and ONCEs (one non-compositional element). It also cites a split into pure, semi-literal and literal idioms.
  • I3. The paper reports that word-by-word translation is a typical cause of misreading idioms.
  • I4. Prior work cited in the paper found that guessing from surrounding context was the most successful strategy for unfamiliar idioms.
  • I5. Cited findings suggest idioms with an identical L1 equivalent are easiest, while L1 transfer otherwise produces erroneous readings.

For Mova

How these ideas could serve Mova, our small open language model — its files, stages and tests:

  • I1 (learn): When evaluating repair rules or teacher tiers, compare outputs on items matched for baseline difficulty, so an apparent gain is not just an easier subset.
  • I2 (world): This graded taxonomy could tag multiword entries in the compiled lexicon, so the world builder knows whether to compose meaning from parts, map through a metaphor, or replace the whole phrase with one concept.
  • I3 (frames): Before building who-did-what-to-whom frames, a check for known non-compositional spans could stop literal frames such as a physical kicking event from being built for "kick the bucket".
  • I4 (answer): When a QA reader meets an unknown figurative phrase in a fable, it could infer the intended meaning from neighbouring events and states, and record that inference as an explainable step.
  • I5 (back): Translation through the meta-world should map idioms to their meaning node and regenerate a target-language expression, rather than carrying over surface words that only look equivalent.

Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.

 Institutions

Also on the byline: Sheikh Bahaei University.

📚 Shelves 4The field of science this work belongs to (OpenAlex fields).Arts and Humanities · 9,296 worksLanguage and Linguistics · 9,206 worksPsychology · 798 worksDevelopmental and Educational Psychology · 260 works

🧭 Topics 3Research subjects and languages the work is about.English · 1,373 worksIdioms & multiword expressions · 155 worksGrammatical error correction & learner language · 80 works

Cite

Cite as Vahid Shahidipour and Mohammad Hassan Tahririan. 2018. Difficulties Facing Iranian EFL Senior High School Learners and Strategies They Use to Understand English Idioms. Issues in Language Teaching 7.

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.22054/ilt.2019.46496.425

@inproceedings{shahidipour2018difficulties,
  title = {{Difficulties Facing Iranian EFL Senior High School Learners and Strategies They Use to Understand English Idioms}},
  author = {Vahid Shahidipour and Mohammad Hassan Tahririan},
  booktitle = {Issues in Language Teaching 7},
  year = {2018},
  doi = {10.22054/ilt.2019.46496.425},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.22054/ilt.2019.46496.425}
}

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