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.
MH Hamzah, AF Abbas, International Journal of Early Childhood Special Education, 2022
Abstract
The aim of the current research is to prepare an integrated learning program based on mathematics standards for the next generation of the NYS and to investigate its impact on the development of the teaching performance of middle school mathematics teachers and the future thinking skills of their students. To achieve the objectives of the research, the researcher prepared a list of mathematics standards for the next generation, which were derived from a list of standards. He also prepared a list of the teaching competencies required for middle school mathematics teachers in light of the list of standards, as well as clarified the foundations of the training program and its objectives and the mathematical
... Show MoreThe research is an attempt to investigate experimentally the influence of teacher’s errors correction and students’ errors correction on teaching English at the College of Physical Education for Women. Errors are seen as a natural way for developing any language but teachers are puzzled the way they can correct these errors. So, this research gives some idea of using two types of errors correction. The sample of the research is female students of the first year stage at the College of Physical Education for Women of the academic year 2009-2010. The whole population of the research is (94) students while the sample is (64). Thus, the sample represents 68% from the population of the research. The sample represents It is hypothesized th
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Optimization is essentially the art, science and mathematics of choosing the best among a given set of finite or infinite alternatives. Though currently optimization is an interdisciplinary subject cutting through the boundaries of mathematics, economics, engineering, natural sciences, and many other fields of human Endeavour it had its root in antiquity. In modern day language the problem mathematically is as follows - Among all closed curves of a given length find the one that closes maximum area. This is called the Isoperimetric problem. This problem is now mentioned in a regular fashion in any course in the Calculus of Variations. However, most problems of antiquity came from geometry and since there were no general methods to solve suc
... Show MorePraise be to Allah, Lord of the Worlds, teach the pen, taught the human what he didn't know, Ihmad - Almighty - and thank him, and repent to him and ask forgiveness, which is the most forgiving, and bear witness that there is no god but Allah alone has no partner, gives and prevents, And I bear witness that Muhammad is a slave to Allah and his Messenger, who called for guidance and good speech and spoke, peace be upon him and his family and companions, and those who followed them until the Day of Judgment.
The study aims to identify the effects of dubbed Turkish drama on the public through the application of a sample of the views of women. The study also attempts to monitor the causes and motives due to the act of observation and to identify the various effects of this act. In order to achieve these goals, the researcher relies on the descriptive approach in addition to the questionnaire and interviews to collect data. It ends with a number of results such as: The study aims to identify the effects of dubbed Turkish drama on the public through the application of a sample of the views of women. The study also attempts to monitor the causes and motives due to the act of observation and to identify the various effects of this act. In ord
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The purpose of this study is to investigate learners' listening comprehension problems with Englishlectures. The study was guided by research question (What are the listening comprehension problems learners have with lectures in English).Furthermore; the main significant goal were declared through conducting this study, as well as providing some procedures of distribution the questionnaire of the study.Moreover, it presents several definitions of listening. This study definitely depends on questionnaire instrument to gathering the required data. The participants of the study were 30 learners completed their secondary school and joined at the college. Based on the findings among the five factors (text, speaker, task, environment, and list
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The fuzzy sets theory has been applied in many fields, such as operations research, control theory and management sciences, etc. In particular, an application of this theory in decision making problem is linear programming problems with fuzzy technological coefficients numbers, as well as studying the parametric linear programming problems in the case of changes in the objective function. In this paper presenting a new procedure which connects and makes link between fuzzy linear programming problem with fuzzy technological coefficients numbers and parametric linear programming problem with change in coefficients of the objective function, then develop a numerical example illustrates the steps of solution to this kind of problems.