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.
Many undergraduate learners at English departments who study English as a foreign language are unable to speak and use language correctly in their post -graduate careers. This problem can be attributed to certain difficulties, which they faced throughout their education years that hinder their endeavors to learn. Therefore, this study aims to discover the main difficulties faced by EFL students in language learning and test the difficulty variable according to gender and college variables then find suitable solutions for enhancing learning. A questionnaire with 15 items and 5 scales were used to help in discovering the difficulties. The questionnaire was distributed to the selected sample of study wh
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Blogs have emerged as a powerful technology tool for English as a Foreign Language (EFL) classrooms. This literature review aims to provide an overview of the use of blogs as learning tools in EFL classrooms. The study examines the benefits and challenges of using blogs for language learning and the different types of blogs that can be used for language learning. It provides suggestions for teachers interested in using blogs as learning tools in their EFL classrooms. The findings suggest that blogs are a valuable and effective tool for language learning, particularly in promoting collaboration, communication, and motivation.
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Imitation learning is an effective method for training an autonomous agent to accomplish a task by imitating expert behaviors in their demonstrations. However, traditional imitation learning methods require a large number of expert demonstrations in order to learn a complex behavior. Such a disadvantage has limited the potential of imitation learning in complex tasks where the expert demonstrations are not sufficient. In order to address the problem, we propose a Generative Adversarial Network-based model which is designed to learn optimal policies using only a single demonstration. The proposed model is evaluated on two simulated tasks in comparison with other methods. The results show that our proposed model is capable of completing co
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Many undergraduate learners at English departments who study English as a foreign language are unable to speak and use language correctly in their post -graduate careers. This problem can be attributed to certain difficulties, which they faced throughout their education years that hinder their endeavors to learn. Therefore, this study aims to discover the main difficulties faced by EFL students in language learning and test the difficulty variable according to gender and college variables then find suitable solutions for enhancing learning. A questionnaire with 15 items and 5 scales were used to help in discovering the difficulties. The questionnaire was distributed to the selected sample of study which consists of 90 (male and female) stud
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Botnet detection develops a challenging problem in numerous fields such as order, cybersecurity, law, finance, healthcare, and so on. The botnet signifies the group of co-operated Internet connected devices controlled by cyber criminals for starting co-ordinated attacks and applying various malicious events. While the botnet is seamlessly dynamic with developing counter-measures projected by both network and host-based detection techniques, the convention techniques are failed to attain sufficient safety to botnet threats. Thus, machine learning approaches are established for detecting and classifying botnets for cybersecurity. This article presents a novel dragonfly algorithm with multi-class support vector machines enabled botnet
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Classifying butterfly species is crucial in biodiversity studies and environmental monitoring. However, manual classification is often a laborious process that requires specialized expertise and is prone to error, especially when species have similar visual characteristics. To address these drawbacks, this paper presents a hybrid approach that combines machine learning with deep learning for feature extraction. To enhance the visibility of important features, preprocessing techniques such as background removal and binarization are applied to butterfly images. Feature extraction was performed using the SqueezeNet convolutional neural network, pretrained on the ImageNet dataset. By discarding the final classification layer, the networ
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Most Internet-tomography problems such as shared congestion detection depend on network measurements. Usually, such measurements are carried out in multiple locations inside the network and relied on local clocks. These clocks usually skewed with time making these measurements unsynchronized and thereby degrading the performance of most techniques. Recently, shared congestion detection has become an important issue in many computer networked applications such as multimedia streaming and
peer-to-peer file sharing. One of the most powerful techniques that employed in literature is based on Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT) with cross-correlation operation to determine the state of the congestion. Wavelet transform is used as a de-noisin