A Construction Grammar Approach To Comprehension Of English Idiom Construction By Chinese EFL Learners

Idioms are conventionalized multiword expressions and contain much cultural information. English idioms form an essential component part of the general vocabulary of English language and one of the most difficult areas of foreign language teaching and learning for EFL teachers and students due to its features, such as fixed structure, semantic integrity and opacity. However, it is important for us to master English idioms, which will make our English more native-like and authentic. Therefore, it is necessary for EFL learners to master some English idioms, and they should be paid more attention to.As so far, there have been a large number of previous studies and researches on English idiom, but there are still some shortcomings. That is, although many linguists at home and abroad have done a lot on idioms from different perspectives, such as cognitive psychology, cognitive linguistics, psycholinguistics, etc., most researches focus on language transfer of the ESL learners on its use and comprehension process. The research is conducted little on English idioms comprehension from the perspective of language acquisition and Construction Grammar.Construction Grammar is construction-based cognitive approach which claims that construction is form- meaning or form-function pairing (Goldberg 1995; Lakoff 1997; Kay & Fillmore 1999). Research on the theory of Construction Grammar in China is mainly about the general overview, or analysis of the English-Chinese corpus, but all of these just stay at the level of theoretical research and the research on application in language acquisition is also punishable by a trial phase. The research on English idiom comprehension from the perspective of Construction Grammar has not presented since now.Base on CG, through the experiment with tests and Think-Aloud protocol, this paper is trying to identify the situation of English idioms comprehension by Chinese EFL learners at three different English proficiency levels which are represented by non-English major undergraduate sophomores (passed CET-4), English major junior undergraduate students (passed TEM-4) and English major junior postgraduate students (passed TEM-8), in order to give a in-depth study to explore the English idiom comprehension and teaching methods, and thus provides some enlightenment to the English idiom learning and teaching.This paper aims to answer the following questions:(1) How do Chinese EFL learners comprehend English idioms?(2) Do they prefer to depend on the main word meaning or the whole structure meaning when understanding English idioms?(3) Do English proficiency levels have an influence to the way of understanding English idioms?From the study, the author found that: (1) Chinese EFL learners acquire and understand unknown English idioms in different ways. Some are from the meaning of individual words which are compound the idioms, while some are getting the meaning from the context. And still some acquire the meaning from some other ways. (2) English proficiency level has a significant effect to the comprehension of English idioms by the EFL learners. There is an obvious tendency of understanding the English idioms for the different level students. That is, the low level EFL learners prefer to get the meaning of idioms by the combination of literal meaning of each word, but the accurate rate is not high. The advanced participants understand the idioms deeper then the former two groups, and they are likely to understand them from the whole meaning and function and the accurate rate is higher than both the low and intermediate level group. The intermediate level students use the two meaning more or less equally, and the accuracy rate is between the other two levels. From the study, it is predicted that the higher the English level is, the more obvious the Chinese students prefer to understand the idioms from the whole structure and function and the more right meaning can be gotten by them.The study combines Second Language Acquisition with Construction Grammar. The conclusion is to be hoped to provide a new perspective to idiom research and CG research. At the same time, the author also hopes that this paper can provide new ideas and inspiration for language acquisition and English idiom teaching.