Abstract:

Phraseological units are a specific group of lexical items that have recently been at the core of the research of many linguists around the world. The interest in their research from different points of view leads us to ask ourselves the question what lexical category they actually are. While researching this topic, we came across two different points of view: some scholars c linguists consider them "a thorn in the side" and others "icing on the cake".

That is why we set ourselves the goal of doing research that will refer to exactly this category of lexical items and which, by summarizing the results of the prepared questionnaires, will give us a modest explanation of this puzzle of ours, which has been challenging us for a long time. So, our idea is to use previously prepared questionnaires containing 10 practical exercises with phraseological units; these exercises should be completed by circling, matching, or supplementing. These questionnaires will be used to survey the third- and fourth-year students studying German, English, and Italian as foreign languages, and, of course Macedonian as their mother tongue, at the Faculty of Philology at the University "Goce Delcev" - Stip, the Republic of North Macedonia. About 50 students from the third and fourth year of study in the listed languages will be included, who we believe have mastered the foreign language at a higher level, which of course includes a good knowledge of the stated target category of phraseological units. We believe that this modest linguistic research of ours will be of great benefit, first of all, to us, teachers, in order to get information from the students on how to approach teaching phraseological units and how to more easily bring them closer to our target group, students- philologists from the Faculty of Philology at UGD-Stip, and to encourage them to use these correctly and to a greater extent in their written and oral communication, i.e. to raise the level of knowledge of the language they are studying through the use of a greater number of phraseological units. In short, we aim to point out that phraseological units are not "a thorn in the side", but, on the contrary, language ornaments or "icing on the cake", and we would be able to do that after receiving feedback from students - their attitudes towards this specific lexical category. We hope that with this research we will give a new direction to the thinking of young linguists and all language lovers in general.

Keywords:

phraseological units, lexical items, language decorations