Learning Of Idiomatic Expressions By Jordanian EFL Students Majoring In English Language And Literature At Mutah University: Attitudes, Difficulties And Strategies
Abstract
The aim of this study was to explore the attitudes of 214 Jordanian EFL students at Mutah University, of both genders, with respect to the importance that they placed on learning English idioms, the challenges that they faced and the strategies that they employed to facilitate their comprehension. Data for the study was collected using a questionnaire with a five-point Likert scale. It was determined that students had robust positive attitudes towards learning English idioms. However, they experienced challenges, such as the absence of counterpart idioms in their native language, the lack of literal meaning in idiomatic expressions, their inexperience of processing idioms, the absence of apposite cultural and historical information, and encountering rare or unknown idioms that occurred out of context. It was shown that learners utilized a range of strategies to assist their idiom comprehension. The most favored strategies encompassed memorization, dictionary consultation and guessing the meaning from the context; the least commonly exploited were usage within sentences and etymological explanation.
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