GREATER DEGREE OF EQUIVALENCE OF PHRASEOLOGISMS FROM MOTHER TONGUE AS A FERTILE GROUND FOR STUDYING THEM IN A FOREIGN LANGUAGE

Phraseologisms as specific lexical constructs are by themselves difficult to adopt regardless of whether it is a native or foreign language, hence the assertion of many about the difficulties in adopting them for Macedonian students of English and German as foreign languages. However, full or partial equivalent phraseologisms found in foreign language teaching are considered as to be a favorable circumstance, i.e. the greater the level of equivalence of phraseologisms from the mother tongue, the more fertile is the soil for studying them in the teaching of a foreign language, in our case English or German. For this purpose, in this paper we will try to provide more concrete explanations supported by data from the research carried out within the project “Supplemental Instruction as a Tool for Improving Students’ Language Competence at the Faculty of Philology”. The aim of this paper is to confirm our thesis that the degree of equivalence of phraseologisms is of great help in their adoption in foreign language instruction. During this project, which is expected to last two semesters, research, i.e. testing is planned of Macedonian students of English and German language, through which we will determine how and whether the level of equivalence plays a major role in the process of studying this specific vocabulary category. Tests are provided that contain fully, partly equivalent, and, of course, zero equivalent phraseologisms from mother tongue as a source language toward target languages-English and German.