Idiom
Cognitive Approach
Cognitive approach is an approach teaching idiomic expression through comic or cartoons. (Rodriguez & Moreno, n.d.)
Comics
According to Dakin (1973), “ ‘the principle of shaping’ claims that learning will proceed most smoothly if complex behaviours are broken down into their component parts and learned bit-by-bit.” By the same principle, we divide the learning of idioms through comics into 3 degrees.
1st Degree: Vivid Visualization
Students will learn the basic ideas of the syntactic and semantic aspects of idioms.
- SYNTAX: “fixed, non-free structure of idioms”, e.g. idioms work as a fixed phrase ‘ring a bell’ but not *the bell jingles.
- SEMANTICS: the meaning of the ‘couch potato’ projected by the visualisation of it. It helps students to associate the idiom with a person sitting down a lot, watching television.
Other than just worksheets and handouts of words only, this is an advantageous way of learning since “words and pictures presented together helped students recall better than alone” (Mayer, 1999). Concrete graphics and comics can effectively increase students’ comprehension of idioms, which is an abstract figurative language. Utilizing the Mental Image Definition/ the prototype theory proposed by psychologist Eleanor Rosch (Brinton, 2010), in which constructing a image prototype is essential for the referent of a word (P.172-174), we hope that the visuals can act as mental images that construct the memorization of an idiom. Unlike the traditional secondary schools approach, getting to know an idiom is no longer by dull repeated memorisation and dictiation, but through vivid visualisation.
2nd Degree: Rich Story Context
Source from: http://babyblues.com/comics/september-26-2015/
Pragmatics of idioms can be obtained through the rich story context of comic strips, where students can better understand the textual circumstances and the usage of the idiom in daily situations, but not confined in the HK secondary school setting of only memorizing the list of idioms in handouts.
Fernando (1996) has the idea of “ideational idioms”, “ideational” is based on Halliday’s the functional categorization (1973, 1985), meaning “language is realised through the speaker’s or writing’s articulation of the experience of the world”. It is through reading the comic strips where the students can grasp the “the state and way of the world” of the particular idiom. As “Interesting stories usually draw students’ attention and easily make students absorbed in them. Contextual information is significantly effective for aiding students’ understanding English idioms.” (Wu, 2008)
3rd Degree: Student Proactive Acquisition - Challenging questions
Source from:http://joshreads.com/?p=26032
The last part will be the most challenging part. It requires the proactive participation of students in guessing the meaning of an idiom. Not by direct instructions, but through inductive coaching, teachers can lead students to deduce the meaning of “ups and downs” from the clues provided in the comic, e.g. take into consideration of “how is you new job?” and how would you imagine the idiom “ups and downs” have to do in a job? However, it is also important to remind students that idioms are semantically conventionalised, very often we can’t predict the meaning from individual words.
Source from: http://candorville.com/2012/09/29/idioms/
Reference
Wu, S.Y. (2008, March). Effective Activities for Teaching English Idioms to EFL Learners.
Retrieved from http://iteslj.org/Techniques/Wu-TeachingIdioms.html
Frenando, C (1996). Idioms and Idiomaticity. Oxford: Oxford University Press
Brinton, L. & Brinton D. (2010). The Linguistic Structure of Modern English. Amsterdam/ Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company
Rodriguez, I.L. & Moreno, E.M.G. (n.d.). TEACHING IDIOMATIC EXPRESSIONS TO LEARNERS OF EFL THROUGH A CORPUS BASED ON DISNEY MOVIES. Retrieved November 21, 2015, from, http://www.um.es/lacell/aelinco/contenido/pdf/17.pdf
