The Effect Of Transparency And Context On The Comprehension Of Unfamiliar English Idioms By Chinese Advanced Efl Learners

English idiom is an important part of the English language system and it has been widely used in the daily life. Therefore, it is important to research on the factors which may influence the English idiom comprehension. Up to now, most of the research has focused on the effect of familiarity, transparency and linguistic context on the idiom comprehension for English native speakers, only a few of studies have begun to focus on L2 learners. Moreover, there were some disagreements of whether the transparency can affect the L2 idiom comprehension. Therefore, this thesis tried to explore the effect of transparency and context on unfamiliar English idiom comprehension for Chinese advanced EFL learners and if there was the interaction effect between the two factors.Based on the "Idiom Decomposition Hypothesis" and the previous studies which researched on the effect of transparency and context on idiom comprehension, this thesis assumed that, the idiom transparency and context can affect the L2 idiom comprehension significantly; the less transparent idiom can benefit more from the inference of the context.This study chose 84 Chinese Junior English majors from Chongqing University as the participants. Among of whom,20 participants were required to do the familiarity and transparency rating tasks of the 60 idioms the study collected in order to select the target idioms. At last,12 high transparent idioms and 12 less transparent unfamiliar idioms were selected. After that, the other 64 participants were asked to do the idiom comprehension test with and without context situation respectively and then, they were required to do the transparency judgment test.The results of this study show that idiom transparency has significant effect on idiom comprehension for Chinese advanced English learners. That means the transparent idioms are much easier to be understood than less transparent idioms. Moreover, the context can affect idiom comprehension significantly. That is to say, the idiom comprehension presented in context condition is much better than that without context especially for less transparent idioms. However, the results indicate that there is no interaction effect between transparency and context significantly.The results of this study had some enlightenment from both the theoretical and pedagogical aspects. First, the results confirms the Idiom Decomposition Hypothesis to some extent, that is, the closer relationship between the literal meaning of constituents and the metaphorical meaning of the idiom, the easier to get the right meaning of the idiom. Moreover, some important pedagogical significance for L2 idiom comprehension was provided in this study. The students should be guided to use the relationship between the literal meaning of some idioms'constituents and the whole metaphorical meaning rather than simply memorize it. When teaching the unfamiliar English idioms, the teacher should encourage the students to guess the metaphorical meaning of idioms from the literal meaning of the idiom's constituents. What's more, when encountering the unfamiliar idioms, the teacher should also provide the students of highly biased context towards the metaphorical meaning to comprehend the idioms. To sum up, it is important for Chinese EFL learners to use the semantic analysis and inference from the context to learn unfamiliar English idioms.