In A Manner Of Speaking: Assessing Frequent Spoken Figurative Idioms To Assist ESL/EFL Teachers

Abstract

Recent information on the frequency of idioms in spoken American academic English (Simpson & Mendis, 2003) and in contemporary spoken American English (Liu, 2003) has helped language teachers decide which ones might be useful to teach to ESL/EFL students. However, as Liu (2003, p. 672) has noted, what constitutes an ‘idiom’ not only varies from scholar to scholar, but is also affected by context. Therefore, to identify more idioms to teach to ESL/EFL students, we must first identify criteria to define an idiom and then search a corpus, or a large collection of texts, to establish their frequency.

This study attempts first to outline criteria to identify a particular type of idiom, what some people have called ‘figurative idioms’ (Cowie, Mackin, & McCaig, 1983; Alexander, 1987; Howarth, 1998) or transparent/semi-transparent/semi-opaque metaphors (Moon, 1998; Fernando & Flavell, 1981). The next step involves doing a corpus search to establish the frequency of a number of these figurative idioms, or what will hereafter be called ‘figuratives’. To establish frequency in British English, a corpus search was done in the spoken part of the British National Corpus (BNC) for the idioms which qualify as figuratives
from both Simpson and Mendis’s (2003) and Liu’s (2003) spoken American English lists. One aim of this comparison is to test their frequency in a balanced corpus – that is, a collection of texts made up of 90 percent written texts (imaginative – poetry, pose and drama – and informative – eight general domains) and 10 percent spoken recordings (conversational and task-oriented) of people of different ages, social class, location and gender. Another aim is to
show which figuratives are more frequently used in spoken English on both sides of the Atlantic – and therefore, may merit teaching time – and which may be more common in one culture or the other. Based on these findings, suggestions are made at the end of the article with regard to the teaching of them.