PEER RESPONSE IN TEACHING ENGLISH IDIOMS TO CHINESE STUDENTS

Oana Dugan  

Peer Response in Teaching Idioms to Chinese Students relates of the instruction facilities offered by such a method in the setting of teaching difficult vocabulary acquisition, such as the one of idiomatic phrases. The paper is also the result of direct observation of student teaching oriented activities and it has proved that group work among Chinese students with reference to idiom learning provided them with increased opportunities to negotiate meaning, which lead to increased comprehension and subsequently to faster acquisition.

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Teaching English to Chinese students proved being both an engaging and challenging task, first of all due to remarkable cultural differences. Another problem that may mainly be encountered when teaching foreign languages to Chinese students is the class size, the number of students being relatively large, sometimes even more that 45 in a class.

Therefore, one of the best methods developed to teach foreign language seems to be peer response. Peer response is the use of learners as sources of information and interactants for each other in such a way that learners assume roles and responsibilities normally taken on by a formally trained teacher / tutor in commenting on and critiquing each other’s products in both written and oral formats in the process of learning/teaching.
As stated by the definition, one can clearly imagine that peer response may be of great help in foreign language (second or third language) acquisition as it develops students’ overall capabilities through the negotiation of meaning. It usually presupposes brainstorming cognitive activities, outlining, drafting, rewriting and editing. It thus enables students to get multiple feedback (e.g. from teacher, peer and self) by means of various tasks. Considering that learning as well as knowledge itself, theoretically speaking, are socially constructed, peer response promotes the use of collaborative group work as a result of the collaborative learning theory. This collaboration among students and tutor can more easily lead to decision making “allowing learners to compare notes on what they have learned and how to use knowledge effectively and efficiently”.
Since the latest theories on idioms perceive the phenomenon as a cognitive mechanism, as a result of the conceptual mappings such as metaphor, metonymy and conventional knowledge which is part of cultural models, (Dugan) peer response seems a good method in teaching idiomatic expressions. Taken into account that cognitive development is a result of social interactions in which an individual learns to extend her or his current competence through the guidance of a more experienced individual (Donato, 1994, 37), idiomatic meaning can easily be “guessed” and brainstormed in groups of students, in which one person may play the role of the more experienced, capable individual whereas some others may be novices. Vygotsky called the space between the person’s actual level of development and the potential level of development the ZONE OF PROXIMAL DEVELOPMENT. This phenomenon happens in peer response activities especially when “the speakers are at the same time individually novices and collectively experts, sources of new orientation for each other and guides through this complex linguistic problem solving” (Donato, 1994, 46)

Idioms constitute one of the most difficult areas of foreign language learning and teaching. This situation makes it sufficiently worthwhile for us to see what cognitive linguistics and semantics can contribute by means of peer response methods to the learning of idioms. The category of idioms is a mixed bag. It involves metaphors (to spill the beans), metonymies (to throw up one’s hands), pairs of words (cats and dogs), idioms with  it (live it up), similes (as easy as pie), sayings (a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush), phrasal verbs (come up), grammatical idioms (let alone), etc. Most views on idioms agree that they consist of two or more words and that the overall meaning of these words is unpredictable from the meanings of the constituent words. They are assumed to be a matter of language alone, i.e. they are taken to be items of the lexicon that are independent of any conceptual system. According to the traditional view, all there is to idioms is that similar to words, they have certain syntactic properties and have a meaning that is special to the meanings of the forms that comprise them. Idioms are also taken to be independent of each other. This follows from the previous view that idioms are simply a matter of language. Nevertheless, certain relations between words are recognized, but these are only certain sense relations, such as homonymy, synonymy, polysemy ad antonymy. It should be noticed that these are relations of linguistic meanings, not relations in a conceptual system. In the traditional view, linguistic meaning is divorced from the human, conceptual system and encyclopedic knowledge that speakers of a language share. One major stumbling block in understanding and subsequently in translating idioms is that they are regarded as linguistic expressions that are independent of any conceptual system and that are isolated from each other at the conceptual level.

Thus, an important generalization can be made: many idioms, better said, most idioms, are products of our conceptual system and not simply matters of language. An idiom is not just an expression that has a meaning that is somehow special in relation to the meanings of its constituting parts, but it arises from our more general knowledge of the world, embodied in our mentality and in our conceptual system. In other words, idioms are conceptual and not only linguistic in nature. From this point of view, the meaning of idioms can be seen as motivated and not as arbitrary. Knowledge of the world provides the motivation for the overall idiomatic meaning. This is against the prevailing dogma, which maintains that idioms are arbitrary pairings of forms (each with a meaning) and a special overall meaning. When the meaning of an idiom is said to be motivated, it does not necessarily mean that its meaning is fully predictable. In other words, no claim is made that, given the non-idiomatic meaning of an idiom, one can predict what the idiomatic meaning will be, that is associated with the words.

Conventional knowledge can often account for a particular idiomatic meaning in a direct way. Metaphor and metonymy are viewed as cognitive mechanisms that relate a domain of knowledge to an idiomatic meaning in an indirect way. We would like to suggest that the implication of these ideas for translating and learning idioms is that this kind of motivation should facilitate the translatability and acquisition of idioms. (Dugan)

The American psycholinguist Ray Gibbs has found that conceptual metaphors have psychological reality and that they motivate idiomatic expressions. The result shows that people have tacit knowledge of the metaphorical basis for idioms.

Using peer response as a teaching and also learning method, researchers have found that there are a number of psycholinguistic rationales for group work. Group work among Chinese students with reference to idiom learning has proved that students had increased opportunities to negotiate meaning, which lead to increased comprehension, and subsequently to faster acquisition. In this way students had a larger amount of practice, an increased range of language functions used and sometimes, increased error correction in group work.

The suggestions and explanations offered during the peer response activity allowed students to show what they knew about English idioms and also helped them understand and explore cultural differences and different cognitive linguistic systems

An experiment has been conducted. Participants into this experiment have been divided into groups of 5. Each student in a group has been assigned a precise role, so as to ensure that each of them participates in the peer response activity (one student was supposed to be the language monitor, another the timekeeper, and another the solicitor of comments).

·        Groups have been formed according to the students’ field of study (in our case Law, Science and Engineering). Also, there have been organized two peer-tutoring groups formed of students majoring in English, as control groups.

·        Classroom participation norms and expectations have been discussed for peer response activity to address cross-cultural differences or similarities.

·        Peer response forms have been designed by the tutor and handed to work groups. These forms included questions about the forming of mental images of idioms and then about these images. Forms also included translation demands and mental images in the student’s mother tongue as a comparative tool in idiom acquisition.

·        Students have also been asked to give background information on the topic, in other words to explain it in more general terms in both their language and English.

·        Students have finally been asked to write idiomatic expression lists and subsequently to use them in contexts of their own subject to further peer response commenting activities.

According to the general theory of peer response, the language status of the teacher may not be of relevant issue in itself, rather issues of shared linguistic and cultural backgrounds between the teacher and students appear more pertinent. According to Liu and Hansen (2002), “in foreign language settings, the classrooms tend to be linguistically and culturally homogenous, so a couple of classroom scenarios are typical: the teacher does not share the language of her students (e.g. a Japanese teacher of English in Japan); or the teacher does not share the native language of the students (our case)”. In our case students shared the same cultural and linguistic background with each other, but they did not share a complete linguistic as well as cultural background with the tutor. The language to be used in peer response activities may be either L1 or L2 or both, while the text itself is in the L2. In our case the language to be used was a mixture of the two in brainstorming ideas in both Chinese and English and the final presentation of conclusions has been done in the target language, namely English. Taking into consideration that the tutor does not share the native language of the students, they have been encouraged to use L2 (English) for the final results. As an innovation of this method, the tutor has assumed the role of a student in the control group, in her turn encouraging the group members to express their opinions and knowledge so as to teach her about the cultural background of some Chinese idioms. This created greater confidence in students’ expressing ideas and cooperating for the development of the peer response activity.

The peer response experiment has been preceded by a frontal mini-lesson about the cognitive approach of idioms, notably by the explanation of the cultural model factor in the understanding of the idiomatic meaning. According to this information Chinese students became aware that by conventional knowledge as a cognitive mechanism is implied the shared information that people in a given culture have concerning a conceptual domain. This shared knowledge includes standard information about parts, shape, size, use and function of the human experience as well as the larger hierarchy of which it forms a part. This conventional knowledge is called by Lakoff idealized cognitive model, by Holland and Quinn cultural model or folk theory, or by Fillmore frame or scene.

Considered as part of the conventional knowledge, cultural knowledge – shared presuppositions about the world – plays an enormous role in human understanding, a role that must be recognized and incorporated into any successful theory of the organization of human knowledge. Thus cultural knowledge appears to be organized in sequences of prototypical events – schemas that are called cultural models.

When discussing idioms in both English and Chinese, students were asked to keep in mind some properties of culture which would be: the ability to explain the apparent systematicity of cultural knowledge – the observation that each culture is characterized and distinguished from others by fundamental themes; the ability to explain how people come to master the enormous amount of cultural knowledge that the people of any culture have about the world and the way this is reflected by language (D’ Andrade, 1981). The large base of cultural knowledge people control is not static, somehow people extend it to their comprehension of particular experiences as they encounter them. Therefore, a theory of the organization of cultural knowledge must explain the generative capacity of culture.

Thus, one may rightly infer that cultural models are presupposed, taken–for-granted models of the world that are widely shared by the members of a society and that play an enormous role in their understanding of the world and their behaviour in it. It is in this way that anthropologists have come to the idea of folk models as a way of characterizing the different belief systems of different peoples.

It is undoubtedly valid that our understanding of the world is founded on many tacit assumptions. This understanding cultural knowledge is “often transparent to those who use it. Once learned, it becomes what one sees with but seldom what one sees. (Hutchins 1980) In this way cultural understanding seems to be associated mainly to the native-speaker’s intuition and to the analysis of the discourse. Thus the intuitions of native speakers about their language are heavily dependent on the intuitions of these natives as culture-bearers.

PEER RESPONSE MODEL OF ENGLISH –CHINESE IDIOM TEACHING

Taking into account the above-written peer response general considerations comments referring to the conducted experiment, let us now present the form handed to students’ groups.

The tutor first hands out slides with each of the following English idioms typed individually: out of sight, out of mind; to carry coals to Newcastle; to add fuel to the flames; scapegoat; East, West, home is best; to let the grass grow under one’s feet; to have bats in the belfry; to kill two birds with one shot.

General demands for each idiom discussion:

1.      What do you think the meaning of the following idiom(s) might be?

2.      Try giving a word for word translation of the idioms in Chinese.

3.      What is the general background mental image you have when translating out of sight, out of mind, etc?

4.      Try giving a free adaptation of the English idiom and cultural model into Chinese.

5.      Do you think there might be a Chinese equivalent for this idiom?

6.      What sort of mental images do you have when stating the Chinese idiom?

Comments: These questions are mainly general questions applicable to all the stated idioms. They invite members in a group to think and provide ideas related to the possible meaning of the idiomatic expression. The tutor has the duty to provide the right meaning to the groups that could not identify it and explain the mental image behind it in the target language. Students are then invited to compare the mental images in their mother tongue with those in the target language. The tutor assumes the role of student when peers give their own cultural explanations and possible idiom equivalent. In the case of the English idiom out of sight out of mind, a possible Chinese equivalent might be 久 别 情 疏 (jou bie qing shu), which translated literally might be long separation loses intimacy. The mental images in English are related to eyes and lost memory, whereas in Chinese, they may be said to be related to departure and also losing remembrance.

Among the stated idioms, the most difficult ones to “translate” without any help in Chinese or to identify mental images for in English were to carry coals to Newcastle, to let the grass grow under one’s feet and to have bats in one’s belfry. The control groups  (formed mainly by students majoring in English) were able to identify the mental image of the belfry as a metonymy for head and also the cognitive metaphor of the coals as that of a little substance added to much substance is uselessness, recognizing a possible Chinese equivalent for the last idiom in 贩槟榔到广东, (fan bin lang dao Guangdong), a literal translation of it being to carry coconuts to Guangdong, a province that produces these fruit, or in 将 石 头 搬 到 山 上 （jiang shi tou ban dao shan shang）, which literally would mean  to carry rocks to the mountain.

Almost similar mental images may be said to have been identified in both languages.

Remarkably, almost instant equivalents were found for the one-word idiomatic expression scapegoat which in Chinese would find an equivalent in替罪羊 (ti zui yang), (a loan translation), the cultural model in Chinese taking after that of the “emissary” goat  (present also in the French culture) and not that of the escaping goat. Therefore, there might be said that in Chinese as well, the idiom is built on the metonymy THE GOAT STANDS FOR HUMAN SINS.

If the English are said to add fuel to the flames, the Chinese students identified oil as the fuel substance (火上加油) (huo shang jia you) and the Chinese cultural model is associated mentally to the idea of worsening things, the Chinese idiom/ loan translation being built on the same general “intercultural” metaphor that is ANGER IS FIRE.

GENERAL CONCLUSIONS

·    Methodologically and cognitively speaking, peer response in teaching English idioms to Chinese students has proved that students can better exercise and therefore develop their thinking capacity as opposed to the traditional way of teaching which mainly presupposes passively receiving information from the teacher.

·        Students have thus been able to exert an active role in the process of learning and teaching, as they could reconceptualize their ideas in light of their peers’ reactions (the tutor has assumed the role of a peer, hence minimizing the authoritative-constraining role of the “traditional” teacher);

·        The suggestions, explanations and opinions expressed during the peer response idiom-teaching activity have allowed students to show what they know about English as well as Chinese idioms.

·        The frame presentation introducing the cognitive approach to idioms from a cross-linguistic (English- Chinese) perspective opened a new view on learning idioms by means of cultural as well s cognitive mechanisms. Students’ opinions were that the cultural contrasts as well as similarities may help them better memorize idioms in the target language.

·        Translation practice and comparative cultural models are helpful in retaining the meaning of some idiomatic expressions

·        By employing peer response, students have had the opportunity to show what they have previously learnt in both English and Chinese with respect to idiomatic expressions.

·        Peer response encourages students to make use of their communicative powers by negotiating meaning in two completely different languages and cultures, thus peer response being a “fruitful environment for students to negotiate meaning and practice a wide range of language skills” (Liu & Hansen 2002)

·        Each student has been assigned a clear task, in this way being able to realize the potential of being an active participant in collaboration.

·        The method proved interactive and more pleasant by means of self- imagining mental images in the target language consequently making the English class more relaxed.

·        Matching students and tutor with different linguistic and cultural backgrounds as well as mixing students with different English linguistic abilities proved helpful especially because idioms are culture dependant.

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