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.
research objectives to:
1. identify the social, economic and cultural factors affecting consumption.
2. detect the consumption culture among the population in the city of Erbil.
3. Identify the GATT consumer protection and rights.
The most important results:
1. that there is variation in the answers of respondents about keep up with modernity in the basic consumption (necessary), it swallowed the proportion of yes answers about keep up with modernity in food consumption (72%), and is an indication of growing consumer awareness of the individual in the side of nutrition. The clothing on the side of the proportion of yes answers amounted to (85%), in the health field note that the percentage of yes answers (83%), who are abr
This research aims to examine the effectiveness of a teaching strategy based on the cognitive model of Daniel in the development of achievement and the motivation of learning the school mathematics among the third intermediate grade students in the light of their study of "Systems of Linear Equations”. The research was conducted in the first semester (1439/1440AH), at Saeed Ibn Almosaieb Intermediate School, in Arar, Saudi Arabia. A quasi-experimental design has been used. In addition, a (pre & post) achievement test (20 Questions) and a (pre & post) scale of learning motivation to the school mathematics (25 Items) have been applied on two groups: a control group (31Students), and an experimental group (29 Students). The resear
... Show Morewas studied by taking several different values for the constant α and fixing the other three variables β, c and d with the values 25.58, -0.7142857, and -1.142, respectively. The purpose of this paper is to know the values by which the system transforms from a steady state to a chaotic state under the initial conditions x, y, and z that equal -1.6, 0 and 1.6 respectively. It was found that when the value of α is equal to 0, the Chua system is in a steady state, and when the value of α is equal to 9.5 and the wave is sinusoidal, the system is in oscillation, and when α is equal 13.4 the system is in a Quasi-chaotic state, and finally the system turns to the chaotic state when the value of α equals 15.0
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E-learning is a lifeline for the educational process, which contributed to the sustainability of working educational organizations and prevented them from stopping, so the study came to measure the compatibility between E-learning quality dimensions (information technology, educational curricula, teaching methods, and intellectual capital of educational institution) as an independent variable, and educational services quality dimensions represented by (safety, tangibility, reliability and Confidence) as a dependent variable. The sample was 150 teachers was drawn from the College of Administration and Economics community of 293 teachers through the use of several statistical methods to measure the degree of correlation and impact between the
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Objective: Assessment of health problems and identify demographical information to elderly. Methodology:
it is a descriptive study, data were collected by the researchers depended on the direct interview with the
elderly by using the study instrument (questionnaire) as well as review the records of the geriatric.
Results: The majority of study sample (66%) were males and (24.3%) were within age group (70-74) years,
(44.7%) were widows, and (41.7%) did not read and write. This study applied the international classification
of diseases(short-table) in (11) items, which stated that most of the elderly were complaining from
health problems: debility of hearing (80.65%), eczema or allergies (69.35%), debility of vision (66.9
This study aims to identify the amount of the effect of the ability to learn the individuals within the organization on the accumulation of intellectual capital and the role it plays in improving the performance of the organization, and to achieve that, the researcher designed a questionnaire to collect data and information from the surveyed respondents and analyzed using SPSS software, the study concluded after testing hypotheses to have a direct impact between the capacity for organizational learning and the accumulation of intellectual capital, which in turn affects the accumulation of intellectual capital as a positive and direct impact on the performance of the organization, al
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Writing in English is one of the essential factors for successful EFL learning .Iraqi students at the preparatory schools encounter problems when using their background knowledge in handling subskills of writing(Burhan,2013:164).Therefore, this study aims to investigate the 4thyear preparatory school students’ problems in English composition writing, and find solutions to these pro
... Show MoreThis paper describes a practical study on the impact of learning's partners, Bluetooth Broadcasting system, interactive board, Real – time response system, notepad, free internet access, computer based examination, and interaction classroom, etc, had on undergraduate student performance, achievement and involving with lectures. The goal of this study is to test the hypothesis that the use of such learning techniques, tools, and strategies to improve student learning especially among the poorest performing students. Also, it gives some kind of practical comparison between the traditional way and interactive way of learning in terms of lectures time, number of tests, types of tests, student's scores, and student's involving with lectures
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