| Idioms, as the essence of language, reflect a nation's historical and cultural background, people's view of the world and the way of thinking. Idioms have penetrated into all fields of human life, such as: literature, art, politics, economy, science, technology, sports and so on. In spite of the fact that idioms are omnipresent and indispensable to people's communication, due to the differences in linguistic form and conceptual basis between Chinese and English idioms, comprehending idioms has become a great obstacle for the Chinese EFL learners . In addition, since the meaning of an idiom can not always be readily derived from the literal meaning of its constituent elements, it further intensifies the difficulty of the learner's comprehension. For a long time, researches on idioms are mainly focused on their syntactical features. Although recently, cognitive psychologists, cognitive linguists and psycholinguists have emphasized on studying the cognitive processing of idioms, their researches are mostly based on native speakers. The idiom comprehension of EFL learners is comparatively insufficient.Considering the elements mentioned above, this thesis aims at exploring Chinese EFL learners'processing of novel English idioms in context, and meanwhile, it investigates the influence of two factors, i.e., L2 proficiency and idiom type, on learners'comprehension of English idioms in the hope of gaining some pedagogical implications so as to facilitate idiom learning and teaching.Data are collected by means of think-aloud protocol and idiom comprehension test. The statistical techniques employed for analysis are descriptive statistic, independent sample t-test, paired sample t-test, one-way ANOVA and two-way ANOVA with SPSS 16.0. Based on the results, the thesis comes to three principal conclusions:(1) Eleven kinds of processing strategies are identified from analyzing think-aloud transcription.(2) L2 Vocabulary proficiency exerts great influence on learner's idiom comprehension in context. Advanced learners perform significantly better than intermediate learners on idiom comprehension in context. In terms of strategies employed, learners of higher L2 vocabulary proficiency employ strategies more frequently and more diversified than learners of lower L2 vocabulary proficiency to comprehend English idioms in context.(3) Idiom type also exerts a significant influence on the learners'idiom comprehension in context. The underlying conceptual basis that distinguishes different types of idioms plays an important role in the comprehension of L2 idioms. Idioms that have a different conceptual basis to Chinese ones are much more difficult than the idioms with a different linguistic form from Chinese ones for the learners to comprehend.These findings shed light on L2 idiom teaching: 1) It is reasonable and necessary to give a cross linguistic comparison between idioms of English and Chinese in terms of their conceptual basis so as to help the learners to get a more accurate understanding of the English idioms. 2) It is worthwhile for teachers to offer learners some strategy training to enable the learners to figure out the meaning of unknown idioms on their own. 3) It is advisable for teachers to provide them with more exercises focusing on inferring the meaning of the idiom from the context including the tense of sentences, the tone of the context, some particular constituent of the idiom and so on. 4) It is reasonable to advise the learners to accumulate idioms consciously during their English learning. It would certainly benefit the learners'idiom comprehension as well as English learning in the long run.
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