Idioms are a very important part of the English language: you are told that if you want to go far (succeed) you should pull your socks up (make a serious effort to improve your behaviour, the quality of your work, etc.) and use your grey matter (brain).1 Learning and translating idioms have always been very difficult for foreign language learners. The present paper explores some of the reasons why English idiomatic expressions are difficult to learn and translate. It is not the aim of this paper to attempt a comprehensive survey of the vast amount of material that has appeared on idioms in Adams and Kuder (1984), Alexander (1984), Dixon (1983), Kirkpatrick (2001), Langlotz (2006), McCarthy and O'Dell (2002), and Wray (2002), among others. The paper concentrates on idioms as a learning-translation problem; it makes no claim to be comprehensive or academically rigorous. Leech (1989) defines an idiom as follows: “An idiom is a group of two or more words which we have to treat as a unit in learning a language. We cannot arrive at the meaning of the idiom just by adding together the meanings of the words inside it. E.g.John and Mary usedto be hardup (='They had very little money'.)”(P.186) To be more exact, an idiom is a sequence of words which is semantically and syntactically restricted, so that they function as a single unit. From a semantic point of view, the meanings of the individual words cannot be summed to produce the meanings of the idiomatic expression as a whole. Thus, fly off the handle, which means lose one's temper, cannot be understood in terms of the meanings of fly, off, or handle. The idiom phrase hot air, which means empty or boastful talk, is neither hot nor air; with hot air we are dealing with a set phrase where the meaning cannot be suggested on the basis of the two constituent words. The idiomatic meaning of spill the beans in So who spilt the beans (=told the secret) about her affair with David? has nothing to do with beans or with spilling in its literal sense. The foreign-language learner is left trying to figure out where and how the beans were spilt. From a syntactic viewpoint, the constituent parts of an idiom often do not permit the usual variability they display in other contexts. The point to be emphasized here is this: most idioms do not lend themselves easily to manipulation by speakers and writers; they are invariable and must be learned as wholes, but concord ofnumber, person and gender in the idiom phrase is still necessary, i.e. the verbs must be put into the correct form, and pronouns must agree with their antecedents: I don't give a hoot for her opinion! 2 • She doesn't give a hoot for my opinion! etc.)║He won, but only by the skin of his teeth2• She won, but only by the skin of her teeth• Iwon, but only by the skin ofmy teeth,I had to run for the train, and caught it by the skin of myteeth, etc.║He kept pullingmy arm, throwing me off my balance 2 • She kept pulling his arm, throwing him off his balance • We kept pullingher arm, throwingher offher balance, etc.2 The present paper is divided into five parts, as follows: Part I: An Overview; PART II: Learner’s Difficulties with Idioms; PART III: Some Pedagogical recommendations and Suggestions about Idioms; Part IV: Activities to Practice Idiomatic Expressions; Part V: Summary and Conclusion.
Online learning is not a new concept in education, but it has been used extensively since the Covid-19 pandemic and is still in use now. Every student in the world has gone through this learning process from the primary to the college levels, with both teachers and students conducting instruction online (at home). The goal of the current study is to investigate college students’ attitudes towards online learning. To accomplish the goal of the current study, a questionnaire is developed and adjusted before being administered to a sample of 155 students. Additionally, validity and reliability are attained. Some conclusions, recommendations, and suggestions are offered in the end.
Social Networking has dominated the whole world by providing a platform of information dissemination. Usually people share information without knowing its truthfulness. Nowadays Social Networks are used for gaining influence in many fields like in elections, advertisements etc. It is not surprising that social media has become a weapon for manipulating sentiments by spreading disinformation. Propaganda is one of the systematic and deliberate attempts used for influencing people for the political, religious gains. In this research paper, efforts were made to classify Propagandist text from Non-Propagandist text using supervised machine learning algorithms. Data was collected from the news sources from July 2018-August 2018. After annota
... Show MoreTelevision white spaces (TVWSs) refer to the unused part of the spectrum under the very high frequency (VHF) and ultra-high frequency (UHF) bands. TVWS are frequencies under licenced primary users (PUs) that are not being used and are available for secondary users (SUs). There are several ways of implementing TVWS in communications, one of which is the use of TVWS database (TVWSDB). The primary purpose of TVWSDB is to protect PUs from interference with SUs. There are several geolocation databases available for this purpose. However, it is unclear if those databases have the prediction feature that gives TVWSDB the capability of decreasing the number of inquiries from SUs. With this in mind, the authors present a reinforcement learning-ba
... Show MoreThe Reasons behind the decadence of the studies concerning the evening school in Salah al Deen A field study
The present study aims to reveal the extent of the influence of the acquired organizational immune through its dimensions (organizational vaccination, organizational learning, organizational memory, and benchmarking) in the application of knowledge management strategies in its two dimensions (codification strategy, personalization strategy) as well as clarifying that influential relationship between the study variables Because of its importance in reducing resistance to change by responding to the requirements of the environment. A set of main and sub-hypotheses emerged from the study, which was formulated in view of the hypothesis scheme of the study, and i
... Show MoreThe research aimed to identify "the effectiveness of educational-learning design according to the model of brain compatibility in achievement among firstmiddle grade students in mathematics", in schools affiliated with the Second Karkh Directorate of Education. To achieve the goal of research, the following zero hypothesis has been formulated: " There is no statistically significant difference at the semantic level (05.0) between the average scores of experimental group students who will study with design accreditation (educational - learning) according to the brain compatibility model and the grades of control group students who will study in the usual way in the achievement thinking test". The research community, which is represented by
... Show MoreBackground: Proper cleaning and shaping of the whole root canal space have been recognized as a real challenge, particularly in oval-shaped canals.This in vitro study was conducted to evaluate and compare the efficiency of different instrumentation systems in removing of dentin debris at three thirds of oval-shaped root canals and to compare the percentage of remaining dentin debris among the three thirds for each instrumentation system. Materials and methods: Fifty freshly extracted human mandibular molars with single straight oval-shaped distal root canals were randomly divided into five groups of ten teeth each. Group One: instrumentation with ProTaper Universal hand instruments, Group Two: instrumentation with ProTaper Universal rotary
... Show MoreThis research basically gives an introduction about the multiple intelligence
theory and its implication into the classroom. It presents a unit plan based upon the
MI theory followed by a report which explains the application of the plan by the
researcher on the first class student of computer department in college of sciences/
University of Al-Mustansiryia and the teacher's and the students' reaction to it.
The research starts with a short introduction about the MI theory is a great
theory that could help students to learn better in a relaxed learning situation. It is
presented by Howard Gardener first when he published his book "Frames of
Minds" in 1983 in which he describes how the brain has multiple intelligen
This study seeks to identify the role that the leadership trend plays in the management of health institutions in Iraq and its impact on improving the quality of the health service provided by analyzing some opinions of affiliates working in the Iraqi health sector where a survey list was used as a main tool for collecting primary data, as it was subjected to this analysis ( 60) of the medical staff, of whom (40) are doctors and (20) are affiliated with the rank of assistant physician, and (60) members of the administrative cadre have undergone their various job ranks and administrative specializations (department manager, auditor, observer, accountant, statistician, secretary). Reliance on statistical software (spss) in data ana
... Show MoreThe modernity of election practices of the elections in Iraq, according to the democratic approach, has led to a struggle between political rival forces reflecting a deep pressure on the tools involved in the management, marketing or control of these elections across the general social level. Hence the problem of research resides in answering the following question: What is the nature and size of the pressures affecting the media performance of Al-Iraqia News channel before the legislative elections of 2018 in Iraq?
The objectives of the research were the following:
1. to identify the nature of the pressures that limit the Al-Iraqia News channel’s perfo