The use of idiom comprehension strategies by adolescent English as a foreign language learners who are native speakers of Estonian
The use of idiom comprehension strategies by adolescent English as a foreign language learners who are native speakers of Estonian

Summary/Abstract: In addition to individual words, the mental lexicon stores lexical chunks, such as idioms, which provide foreign-language learners with the capacity to acquire the language more effectively. Since the role the parts play in the meaning of the whole reduces the learning burden of multi-word expressions, the present contribution addresses the facilitating effect of idiom transparency and learners’ tendency to utilise it in the comprehension process of unfamiliar English-as-a-foreignlanguage idioms. Moreover, as foreign-language learners automatically tend to look for similarities between languages, it was hypothesised that adolescent Estonian (pre)intermediate English-language learners, first and foremost, utilise native-language knowledge in the comprehension process of unfamiliar English idioms. A think-aloud study, which was carried out to provide an in-depth understanding of their strategies, revealed that whereas the majority of the informants relied on semantic analysis, the recourse-to-native-language strategy was more successful.

• Details
• Contents