A Cognitive Approach To English Idiom Acquisition

The research is to verify by experiment the effectiveness of cognitive approach inidiom acquisition in textbooks for English majors. Since conceptual metaphors andimage schemas have some specific cognitive features, it is claimed that both conceptualmetaphors and image schemas can facilitate the learning of those linguistic expressionsderived from the two cognitive models. Furthermore, conceptual metonymy can alsomotivate the meaning of idioms thus can promote the acquisition of idioms too.Moreover, conventional knowledge, which is regarded as a culture model by somelinguists, can help the English learners to understand the idioms better.The effectiveness of the cognitive approach to the acquisition of idioms is exploredand examined by experimental studies with the participation of Chinese undergraduatestudents majoring in English who are divided into control and experimental group. Eachstudy consists of a pre-test, teaching process, a post-test, and a questionnaire. In the lightof the experimental results, the author discusses the implications of this cognitiveapproach for English learning and teaching.