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.
This study aimed to identify the role of school administration in achieving educational and learning goals from the point of view of educational supervisors in the stage of basic education. The descriptive method was adopted. As for the sample size, it has reached (59) educational supervisors. A questionnaire consisting of 29 paragraphs divided into four areas was used. The data were statistically analyzed on the Chi-square test, the percentage, and the mono-variance analysis. The result showed that the school administration contributes to achieving educational goals. It also works to solve problems in democratic ways, and in modern methods, there are differences in the criteria for choosing the headmaster. The study recommended that sch
... Show MoreOrganizational learning is one of the most important means of human resource development in organizations, but most of the organizations, especially public ones do not realize the importance of organizational learning enough, and estimated his role accurately in building intellectual capital, the resource competitive importantly for organizations of the third millennium and who suffers is other end of lack of understanding of its meaning and how to prove its presence and measured in public organizations, so there is the need for this research, which aims to investigate the effect of organizational learning its processes (knowledge acquisition, Information transfer, Interpreting the information, Organizational me
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The problem of research is that there are ways to protect and sustain environmentally important sites in Iraq. There are no documentary sources for these sites, such as the natural landscape of natural and important natural resources, which suffer from severe environmental neglect
Los nombres propios nombran a un ser o a un objeto, distinguiéndolo de los demás seres de su misma clase, se escriben siempre con letra mayúscula a principio de palabra. Los lingüistas hacen mayor hincapié en las divergencias de referencia, entre nombres propios y nombres comunes. Así, suele decirse que el sustantivo propio no tiene como referente ningún concepto. El asunto de la traducción de los nombres propios parecería una cuestión de gusto personal del traductor pero vemos también que en algunas épocas es más frecuente traducirlos, y en otras, por el contrario, se prefiere dejar esos nombres en su forma original, tal vez con algunas adaptaciones ortográficas. Parecería entonces cuestión de modas. Pero, eviden
... Show MoreThis research aims at identifying the communicative habits and content reflections on the communication process, especially the young audience which is one of the main group for whom the announcements are made. Because young people face life with passion and aspiration making them respond to each effect used by the media in the design of the advertising using all the effective techniques, attractive methods for young children like depending on drama, technical tricks, music and logos easily to be remembered and responded to the desires of the young in their entertainment. This research also aims at identifying the impact of the internet as a channel of commercial advertising on the purchasing behavior of young people at the universities
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The current research aims to find out ( the effectiveness of the structural model of learning in the acquisition of geographical concepts at the first grade average students ) , and achieving the goals of research has been formulating the null hypothesis of the following :
" There is no difference statistically significant when Mistoi (0.5 ) between the mean scores of the collection of students in the experimental group that is studying the general geographical principles " Bonmozj constructivist learning " and the mean scores of the control group , which is considering the same article ," the traditional way " to acquire concepts.
The researcher adopted th
... Show MoreThe present analysis targets to recognize the influence of the separate teaching approach on the accomplishment of grammar for scholars of the College of Islamic Sciences. The target of attaining this target led the investigations developing the subsequent null theories: 1. No statistically substantial variance is happened at the consequence level of 0.05 between the mean scores of the scholars in the investigational category who learnt consistent with the separate learning approach and the mean scores of the scholars in the control category who learnt in the conventional method in the accomplishment test. 2. No statistically substantial variance has been observed at the consequence level of 0.05 in the mean differences between the
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The study aims to identify the level of cognitive beliefs, as well as to identify the level of self-organized learning strategies among intermediate school students. The study also aims to identify the differences in the level of self-organized learning strategies among intermediate school students in term of gender, branch (scientific, literary). In order to achieve the research objectives, the researcher designed a scale to measure the cognitive beliefs. As for the scale of self-organized learning strategies, the researcher adopted a scale of (Pintrich et al. 1991), which was translated by (Izzat Abdelhamid, 1999) , For self-organized learning strategies, the sample consisted of (400) students from the research population, whic
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