The Constraints On Chinese EFL Learners' Comprehension Of English "Anger" Idioms

Idioms are omnipresent and indispensable to everyday communication. In addition to information intrinsic in it, idioms are particularly powerful in expressing personal affection and attitude. As one dimension of idiomaticity, proper use of idioms has become an important indicator of nativelikeness pursued by L2 learners.There has been a large body of literature on L2 vocabulary development, yet studies on L2 idiom comprehension and learning are relatively sparse. Idioms possess distinct properties that distinguish them from other parts of vocabulary in a language. The structure of an idiom is relatively inflexible and the sense might be literal, but more than often it bears an idiomatic meaning. Owing to the fact that the meaning of an idiom cannot be computed by adding the literal meaning of each component word, interpreting an idiom word by word often fails to lead to the idiomatic meaning. It takes time and effort for even native speakers to comprehend and to learn idioms. It is even more difficult for L2 learners.The study begins with a discussion about the definitions of idioms and a brief review of the previous studies on metaphor and some cognitive researches on the relationship between metaphor and idioms. Then a comparison of English and Chinese ANGER conceptual metaphors is presented in Chapter 3 to find out what similarities and differences there are in English and Chinese Anger idioms. Based on Lakoff's theory of Conceptual Metaphor, and drawing on the results of Gibbs' empirical study (1990, 1992) that the meanings of many idioms are motivated by the conceptual metaphors underlying them, the present study attempts to explore the major factors that affect Chinese EFL learners' comprehension of English idioms in the hope of discovering more efficient approaches to English idioms so as to facilitate the idiom learning.The factors investigated in this study are the roles context and compositionality play in idioms understanding. It is hypothesized that idioms with context are easier to understand than the ones without context and that compositional idioms are easier to understand than non-compositional ones. To make the study more robust, the factors are tested in two same level classes and it is hypothesized that there should be no significant difference between two classes that are the same in terms of their English proficiency.72 second-year non-English major students of two classes from XiDian University participated in the research. Altogether 8 idioms were chosen for investigation: four representative ANGER idioms and four filler idioms of other concepts. In order to see if students of the two classes are of the same proficiency in English, an English Language Skills Assessment (ELSA) is given to both classes. The result of an independent t-test showed no significant difference in the participants' English proficiency (t(1,72)=.273, p=.785).This study employs three tests, each of which represents one condition in which L2 idioms are studied. They are "pure guessing" (idioms without contexts), "Q&A guessing" (idioms with only stimulating questions) and idioms with reading context. Data will be processed according to the research questions to see the major constraints on subjects' comprehension of L2 idioms. The results show strongly that reading context can greatly enhance the understanding of L2 idioms; compositional idioms are easier to understand than noncompositional ones; meanwhile for compositional idioms, those with the same cultural encoding are easier to understand than those with different encoding; and the difference between the two classes in the understanding of idioms is mainly due to mode of testing with multiple choice task (MCT) outscoring writing task. It is also found that the comprehension of L2 idioms ought to be viewed as a cognitive process mainly constrained by particular context, cultural and linguistic factors. Finally, implications and limitation of the research were clarified and suggestions for future study were offered.