ABSTRACT

An idiom is a fixed phrase which has been used for a long time. It is an important part of English, which is a special form of language and full of expressiveness. An idiom is conventional, integrated and metaphorical. It is widely considered as a learning difficulty by most L2 learners. The L2 learners’ learning and understanding strategies of idioms have been paid great attention to by the researchers.

This study is to explore the understanding strategies taken by L2 learners. Based on 10 intermediate-level learners and 10 high-level learners as subjects, the study strives to find out the understanding strategies they take under different circumstances (without or with context), in order to find out different levels of L2 learners’ tendency of idiom understanding strategies. Think-aloud will mainly be adopted in this study to gather data. And the study shows that:

1.Without any context, both high-level learners and intermediate-level learners will guess from its literal meaning (LM strategy); 

2.With context, both of them will guess from the context (GC strategy).

3.High-level learners will take more than one strategy at one time and their accuracy is higher. 

This study finds that taking more than one strategy, enriching L2 learners’ background knowledge and putting the idioms into context can improve the accuracy of idiom comprehension, which are desirable strategies to understand idioms. In the practical teaching, strengthening the training of the idiom understanding strategies above can help improve the learners’ ability to understand idioms.

Key words: idioms ; understanding strategy ; literal meaning ; context

CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

ABSTRACT

摘要

Chapter One  INTRODUCTION-1

Chapter Two  LITERATURE  REVIEW-3

2.1  The Definition and Classification of Idioms-3

2.1.1  The definition of idioms-3

2.1.2  The classification of idioms-4

2.2  About the Features and Functions of Idioms-5

2.3  About the Factors Affecting the Understanding of Idioms -5

2.4  Summary-7

Chapter Three  RESEARCH DESIGN-8

3.1  Research Questions-8

3.2  Research Method-8

3.3  Research Process-10

3.4  Research Data-11

3.5  Summary-11

Chapter Four  DATA ANALYSIS AND FINDINGS-12

4.1 Data Analysis-12

4.1.1 The data of high-level learners with or without context-12

4.1.1.1 Without context-12

4.1.1.2 With context-14

4.1.2 The data of intermediate-level learners with or without context-15

4.1.2.1 Without context-16

4.1.2.2 With context-17

4.1.3 The analysis of the collected data-18

4.1.4 Summary-20

4.2 Findings-20

4.2.1 The strategies taken by high-level learners-20

4.2.2 The strategies taken by intermediate-level learners-21

Chapter Five  CONCLUSION-23

REFERENCES-25

APPENDIX-26