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.
School administration has an effective role in stimulating academic achievement, as it is the ideal regulation and activation of material and human power to achieve the goals of the educational process. This role has axes in the form of interests, aids, and specific procedures exercised by the school administration in improving the educational process, and assisting researchers in achieving the highest levels of academic achievement. This activation is achieved through stages of planning, organizing, coordinating, and evaluating.
To achieve the aims of this research, the researcher pursued the descriptive analytical approach, which is considered one of the most appropriate approaches to the nature of this type of research. The qu
... Show MoreDue to the urgent need to develop technologies for continuous glucose monitoring in diabetes individuals, poten tial research has been applied by invoking the microwave tech niques. Therefore, this work presents a novel technique based on a single port microwave circuit, antenna structure, based on Metamaterial (MTM) transmission line defected patch for sensing the blood glucose level in noninvasive process. For that, the proposed antenna is invoked to measure the blood glu cose through the field leakages penetrated to the human blood through the skin. The proposed sensor is constructed from a closed loop connected to an interdigital capacitor to magnify the electric field fringing at the patch center. The proposed an tenna sensor i
... Show MoreBackground: The clinical examination is one of the best suitable methods for diagnosis of low backache. Backache is one disease that the signs, clinical examination finding, and the results on imaging modalities not always related. The straight leg raising (SLR) and slump tests, can be used for diagnosis of lumber disc herniation.
Objectives: To compare the result of the slump test and SLR test in the diagnosis of lumber disc herniation.
Subjects and Methods: A prospective comparative study conducts on 280 patients in Al-Kindy teaching and private clinics complaints of backache, aging between 18-70 years old with acute or recurrent backache, sciatica pai
... Show MorePoisoning with toxic substances accidently or deliberately can be life threatening and especially in some countries that lack the essential tests and facilities to identify the types and causes of these toxic substances. In Iraq, as many other countries, poisoning is one of the chronic public health problems. However, very little literature about the pattern of poisoning cases, types and age is available in Duhok Governorate. Therefore, this study was conducted to determine the most common patterns of poisoning and the related age and gender in Duhok Governorate from 2016-2018, which would possibly contribute to the early diagnosis and treatment of poisoning. The present study was conducted for three years, started from 1st of
... Show MoreThis paper presents ABAQUS simulations of fully encased composite columns, aiming to examine the behavior of a composite column system under different load conditions, namely concentric, eccentric with 25 mm eccentricity, and flexural loading. The numerical results are validated with the experimental results obtained for columns subjected to static loads. A new loading condition with a 50 mm eccentricity is simulated to obtain additional data points for constructing the interaction diagram of load-moment curves, in an attempt to investigate the load-moment behavior for a reference column with a steel I-section and a column with a GFRP I-section. The result comparison shows that the experimental data align closely with the simulation
... Show MoreBackground: The clinical examination is one of the best suitable methods for diagnosis of low backache. Backache is one disease that the signs, clinical examination finding, and the results on imaging modalities not always related. The straight leg raising (SLR) and slump tests, can be used for diagnosis of lumber disc herniation. Objectives: To compare the result of the slump test and SLR test in the diagnosis of lumber disc herniation. Subjects and Methods: A prospective comparative study conducts on 280 patients in Al-Kindy teaching and private clinics complaints of backache, aging between 18-70 years old with acute or recurrent backache, sciatica pain, or low back and sciatica pain for last 12 weeks, while patients
... Show MoreBackground: The value of lateral cephalometric radiographs to evaluate the pharyngeal airway is limited because it provided 2-dimensional (2D) images of complex 3-dimensional (3D) anatomic structures. Three dimensional analyses of the airway volumes are required to understand oral and pharyngeal adaptations in mouth breathing and nasal breathing subjects. The aim of this study was to measure the pharyngeal airway volume and the size of the face, then compare between pharyngeal airway volume in mouth breathing and nasal breathing subjects and find the gender difference in each group, also to study the relation between pharyngeal airway volume and the size of the face. Material and Methods: Fifty patients including 28 males and 22 females wit
... Show MoreIn this study a DFT calculation on cyclopropanone, cyclopropandione and cyclopropantrione molecules was performed using the basis function 6-31G ** / MP2 and exchange correlation potential B3-LYP. The results showed that the ground state of all molecules geometry belong to the point group ð¶2ð‘£where a vibronic coupling between the vibrational motion with the electronic ground state in the molecule C3O3 this leads to a reduction in symmetry of the molecule fromð·3ℎto ð¶2ð‘£, the driving force of this process is accessing to the electronic configuration complies with Hückel aromatic systems with two electrons. Also in this, study the normal modes of vibration, frequencies, intensities and symm
... Show MoreEven though in recent decades a bulk of studies have been accomplished on the use of communicative language teaching (CLT) in English as a foreign language (EFL) environments, fairly a limited numbers of studies precisely dealt with investigating the attitudes of language teachers, students and supervisors concerning the principals of CLT in the context of Iraq. Henceforth, this study was designed to delve into the attitudes of teachers, learners and supervisors about the implementation. To this end, the study was accomplished using a mixed method design. The present study was carried out in two phases: designing and using a questionnaire plus interviewing the teachers, students and supervisors (51 language learners, 41 teachers and
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