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.
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.
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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)
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.
