Abstract:

The Faculty of Philology at UGD-Shtip has teaching majors that primarily aim to train modern teachers of German, English, and Italian as foreign languages. As teachers, trainers or as guides of future language teachers, we aim to produce modern teachers who will be able to transfer knowledge to their students and easily fit into modern educational trends and be in step with world labour market trends. Such challenges require a reconsideration of the ways, i.e., of the methods used in language teaching. As everything in the world changes at lightning speed, so must the methods in the teaching process. This is exactly the topic of our research through which we will try to give an answer to one of the many current questions that we believe affect all stakeholders of the teaching process around the world, and that is finding an appropriate method for studying phraseological units (PUs) in foreign language teaching. There is no doubt that PUs are an important part of language and culture around the world. They cause difficulties for English, German and Italian learners of these as second languages because their meanings are more often than not unpredictable. Non-native speakers can find themselves in trouble at times when encountered with some PUs. To many foreign language learners Pus can be a stumbling block. Obviously, this is because the meaning of the words that constitute a PU in most cases does not match the intended meaning of the unit. Our paper investigates the reasons for the difficulties learners encounter in studying PUs and the practical methods in teaching these.
The research is conducted in three phases: in the first phase we will survey 15 students from the Departments of German, English and Italian who study the phraseology provided in the teaching curricula to see their attitude to these specific lexical categories, i.e., to give an answer to the question ‘How do students perceive the teaching of phraseological units? and the results will be given in a diagram in percentages.
The second phase will be done in two parts: the first part will consist of the use of the traditional method of studying phraseology in the teaching of the specified foreign languages and the evaluation of the acquired knowledge about the phraseology of the foreign languages they study through an appropriate test in order to determine the degree of acquired knowledge. The second part will consist of teaching using the modern method of studying phraseology called the conceptual metaphors method, conducted with the same students as in the first part of this phase, which will also be followed by testing the students involved to determine the degree of the acquired knowledge.
The third phase of the research will consist of a self-evaluation list that all involved students will receive, which will give us information about the attitude of the students-future teachers: Which method of teaching PUs in L2 does teachers prefer - the traditional method or the conceptual metaphors instruction? Through the results obtained from the final phase of the research, we will actually get an answer to the question of what the most appropriate method for teaching and adopting phraseology in a foreign language is, which we as teachers and our students as future teachers should apply in order to perform modern foreign language teaching that will be positioned side by side with the world teaching trends.

Keywords:

Phraseology, traditional teaching, modern teaching, methods.