An Empirical Study Of Narrative Approach In English Idiom Teaching

As an important part of English language,English idioms is one focus of English learning and cultural communication.However,it is difficult to learn and memorize various English idioms for learners.Based on analyzing the characteristics of idioms and summarizing the teaching experience of idioms,the author applied Narrative Approach into the teaching experiment in order to verify the hypothesis that the application of Narrative Approach in teaching and learning English idioms promotes students’learning interest.Furthermore,the author tried to evaluate how effective the Narrative Approach is in the teaching and learning of English idioms than a conventional teaching and learning method.At last,the question "To what extent does the Narrative Approach promote students’ ability to learn and use English idioms autonomously" would be answered.The author designed a teaching experiment of 10 weeks.This experiment includes three questionnaires,pretest,teaching,post-test,and 56 students in two parallel classes as the experimental subject.Class 1 is experimental class,with class 2 as control group.The control group students’ study was carried out by the traditional English-Chinese translation.In the experimental classes,English idioms are taught and leaned by Narrative Approach.At the end of the semester,students will take a test of English idioms to evaluate the teaching and learning effect.The total score of the test is 100.The data of this study are collected mainly through two ways,namely the questionnaire,and testing.In this paper,the main method is the independent sample t-test.Based on the quantitative and qualitative analysis of empirical data,this study arrived at the following conclusions.Firstly,the application of Narrative Approach can facilitate the teaching and learning of English idioms.Both on the translation and actual application of idioms,Students from the experimental group performed better than the control group.Moreover,students from the experimental group also outscored the students from the control group in the post-test.Secondly,Narrative Approach is found to serve as an effective learning method.Students from the experimental group can learn English idioms by themselves consciously with the help of Narrative Approach.The process of learning promotes their abilities to put the learned knowledge into practice.Thirdly,Narrative Approach makes the teaching and learning of English idioms more interesting than the traditional way does.Therefore,the students from the experimental group show greater interests than the students from the control group on learning English idioms.Based on the conclusions,this paper further discussed some pedagogical implications of the teaching and learning on English idioms.