Processing Of English Idioms By Chinese EFL Learners-Effects Of Context, Difficulty And Proficiency Levels

English idioms refer to expressions used by people for a long time and havebecome conventional terms in English. Idiom of a particular kind is the language thatpeople use at a particular time or in a particular place. English idioms have beenwidely used by native speakers in daily spoken and written languages.Comprehending and using English idioms correctly become one of the importantindicators of L2learners’ language ability. Although idioms are very important, it isstill difficult for EFL students to understand and use them appropriately because oflacking some cultural background knowledge of idioms, the limitations of foreignlanguage proficiency and cognitive ability etc.Many studies have been conducted on idiom acquisition, such as cognitivestudies of idiom comprehension, models of idiom acquisition, idiom processingstrategies and factors affecting idiom acquisition and so on. As researchers continueto study on idiom comprehension in depth, there is a growing concern about factorsthat affect the acquisition of idioms. These studies mainly involve effects of context,difficulty and proficiency levels on idiom acquisition. Previous studies on factorsinfluencing idiom acquisition have made great progress, but there were still someinadequacies.1) Although many studies analyzed various factors that affect idiomacquisition, they did not fully explore the importance of conceptual metaphor andcontextual interaction for foreign language learners’ understanding of English idioms.2) Many studies involved effects of context, difficulty (including transparency andconceptual metaphor) and second language levels of learners on idiom comprehension,but they did not explore interaction among those three factors in details. On the basisof conceptual metaphor theory and contextual effect, the present study probesinto effects of three factors: context, difficulty, and foreign languageproficiencies as well as their interaction for EFL learners on English idiomscomprehension. Three major research questions are:1) Whether there is a significantdifference between context group and the group of the same level without context?2)What are the interaction between context and proficiency levels, proficiency levelsand difficulty, as well as context and difficulty?3) What’s the interaction amongcontext, difficulty of idioms and proficiency levels?The current research was conducted at Hunan University. The participants in thisstudy were120undergraduate students who adopted English as a foreign language (EFL). These students were divided into two levels according to their languageproficiency, that is,60were high-levels and the rest were low-levels. Each participanthad received at least6years of English instruction at the junior and middle highschool by the time of this study. Foreign language levels of high-level students werehigher than low-level students. All these subjects selected from The College EnglishPlacement Test of Hunan University directed by Professor Xiao Yunnan. Subjects hadnever participated in the idiom comprehension test. All participants were providedan idiom test paper. Subjects made choices according to their comprehension ofidioms with context or without context. The degree of subjects understandingidioms was presented in the form of a score. There were totally60English idioms.These idioms were divided into two types, one test paper had multiple choiceswith context while the other one without context. Because the test paper wascomposed of60idioms, the highest mark for a subject was60points.The results of the present study show that:1) There is a significantdifference between the group (high and low-level) tested with context and thegroup (high and low-level) without context.2) Interaction between context andproficiency levels of second language has a clear impact on English idiomscomprehension for learners.3) There is no interaction among context effect,difficulty and proficiency levels. These results have some implications. First,subjects from different levels all got low scores while understanding difficultidioms containing some conceptual metaphors, implying that conceptualmetaphor has a great impact on idiom learning. Second, context effect has animpact on understanding idioms. Learners can correctly understand the meaningof idioms as long as the provision of contextual information regardless of foreignlanguage levels of learners and the difficulty of idioms, in particular, idiomscontaining conceptual metaphors. When learners understand these idioms, theexistence of contextual information has a significant impact on idiomcomprehension. Third, proficiency levels have an effect on idiom comprehension;high-level students got higher scores in understanding both easy and difficultidioms than low-level students.