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.

Click pe carte pentru achizitie/
Click on the image to buy it!

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.

On Idioms and Metaphor

    

Click on the image to buy the book!

Taking into account that many linguists do not agree with the ad litteram translation into another language (e.g. Romanian) of the term idiom, one should consider the meanings it has acquired in English. In this language the word idiom does exist and enjoys a wide circulation, and apart the meaning of “language”, (which prevails in Romanian), it might be interpreted as follows: 

- In a broad sense, an idiom is a long-lived group of words characteristic of a language (sometimes impossible to translate ad litteram into another language), comprising grammatical collocations and phrases (fusions, unities and free combinations), most of them being based on degraded metaphors; 

- In a strict sense, an idiom is tantamount to a phraseological fusion. 

According to The Oxford Companion to the English Language (OUP 1992), the term idiom finds its etymology in Latin idioma and Greek idíōma meaning at the beginning a specific property, a special phrasing, from idios = one’s own, personal, private. Archaically, there has been another term, idiotism which has two acceptations. On the one hand it denotes the speech proper to, or typical of, a people or place; a dialect or local language; the unique quality or ‘genius’ of a language. On the other hand it denotes an expression unique to a language, especially one whose sense is not predictable from the meanings and arrangement of its elements, such as kick the bucket, a slang term meaning ‘to die’, which has nothing to do with kicking or buckets. 

In linguistics the term idiomaticity refers to the nature of idioms and the degree to which a usage can be regarded as idiomatic. Some expressions are moe holophrastic and unanalysable than others: for example, to take steps is literal and non-idiomatic in the baby took her first steps, but it may be considered as figurative, grammatically open, and semi-idiomatic in They took some steps to put the matter right, and it may become fully idiomatic and grammatically closed in She took steps to see that was done. These examples demonstrate a continuum of meaning and use that is true for many usages. No such continuum exists, however, between he kicked the buck out of the way and he kicked the bucket last night. Such idioms are particularly rigid: for example they cannot be passivized (the bucket was kicked) or otherwise adapted (bucket-kicking as a synonym for death). 

The Oxford Companion to the English Language also mentions that “although idioms are normally simply slotted into speech and writing, they are occasionally subject to creative word-play, (e.g. on the other hand may become on the other paw in the context of kitten food or kitten shelter)” 

In the same dictionary we find that “it is not unusual for even fluent speakers in the heat of conversation to bled or splice two idioms or collocations whose forms and meanings are similar.” The following example speaks volume of the idea cited above: “That seems an interesting step to go down” (splicing step to take and road to go down). 

Nevertheless, linguists tend to give often incongruous definitions to idioms, thus making it quite difficult to disentangle their essential features. Nevertheless, they are quite often seen as “a terror to any student with a logical and orderly mind. Many of them, indeed, are beyond any common-sensible explanation whatever… Others are based, in fact, on anything which can be employed to convey one’s thoughts briefly and effectively.”[1]

Idioms are divided by Treble and Vallins[2] into: 

a. Grammatical Idioms – those in which grammar and idioms agree, e.g. There is a ladder there. 

b. Ungrammatical Idioms – those in which grammar and idioms disagree, e.g. “It’s me”. “,more than pleased”, “ in less than no time” 

c. Prepositional Idioms - those making use of prepositions in idiomatic phrases, e.g. by chance, at least, after all, etc. 

d. Metaphorical Idioms - those based on metaphors, e.g. a broken reed, a sly dog, etc. 

Hornby’s Dictionary (1990) defines the term idiom as : 

a. a group succession of words that must be learnt as a whole because it is difficult or impossible to understand the meaning from knowledge of the words considered separately; 

b. a form of expressions peculiar to a people, district, group of people, country, or to one individual, as the French idiom, or the Shakespeare idiom 

Webster’s Unabridged Encyclopedic Dictionary (1994) defines it as follows: 

a. the language or dialect of a people, social class, etc. 

b. the usual way in which the words of a language are joined together to express thought; 

c. an accepted phrase, construction, or expression contrary to the usual patterns of the language or having a meaning different from the literal; 

d. the style of expressions characteristic of an individual, as the idiom of Carlyle, Shakespeare, etc. 

Leviţchi (1976) defines idioms as “special forms of speech that are peculiar to the instinct of a language…”, they can also be considered, as W. McMordie (1967) does, as “peculiar uses of particular words, and also particular phrases or turns of expressions which, from long usage, have become stereotyped in English, or any other language”.