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2．Aims
Because an idiom is a phrase where the words together have a meaning that is different from the dictionary definitions of the inpidual words, it can make idioms hard for ESL students and learners to understand.
English idioms are mostly concise, and to the point vivid and figurative, forceful and expressive. The meaning of some idioms is self-evident, whereas the meaning of other idioms is often implicit, which is difficult to deduce from the literal interpretation of their inpidual constituents. This difficulty constitutes one of the chief stumbling blocks t o EFL learners in their semantic interpretation of English idioms.
Kellerman(1978,1979,1983), Irujo(1986) and T.C.Cooper(1999) have studied the comprehension strategies used by learners whose native language is not English when acquiring English idioms. But none of them take Chinese learners as their objects of the study. However, when reviewing Chinese scholars’ studies on English idioms, I find that most of them focus on idiom translation (e.g. Ying 1998; Zhang Ning 1999; Zhang Ruolan 2003). Some researchers introduced studies on the comprehension of the idiomatic expressions from the psycholinguistic perspective (e.g. She et al. 1998, 2000, 2001) or from the cognitive linguistic perspective (e.g. Liu & Zhou 2002). The review shows that little has been done to investigate what strategies in particular Chinese learners use to process English idioms. This paper adopts T.C.Cooper’s research method of thinking-aloud to explore the patterns of strategy used in English idiom processing among advanced, intermediate, and basic level English learners, and proposes suggestions for both teaching and learning English idioms.
3. Methodology
3.1 Subjects
A total of 10 undergraduate students who major in different courses from Nanjing University of Science and Technology in China were chosen as participants on a voluntary basis. All of them are at similar ages but on different English proficiency levels.
The subjects were pided in to three groups according to their English proficiency levels (Wang Xiaomin& Zhang Wenzhong, CELEGA Journal, 2006(29):3-10). The advanced group comprises 2 fourth year English majors, with an average 11 years of English learning experience and, at the time of data collection, have passed the TEM 4(Test of English for English Majors supposed to be attended at the fourth term of the eight terms study in college) and both taken the TEM 8 (Test of English for English Majors supposed to be attended at the eighth term of the eight terms study in college) examination. They might have encountered some idioms before or can process some of the idioms if needed after four years professional study of English. The intermediate group consists of undergraduate students who passed CET 6 (College English Test Band Six) with an average of 489 and have studied English for 7-9 years. They are considered as intermediate proficiency level because they are still on the basic-knowledge-learning-stage of the language considering the whole route to achieve the mastery level of English. The rest of the students who just passed CET 4 (College English Test Band Four) were selected in the study as lower proficiency level students because of the fact that those students have learnt quite of basic knowledge of English in order to get good marks in CET 4.