Abstract:

Idioms and figurative language have been a controversial, contentious topic in both linguistics and ELT (English Language Teaching) (Fernando, 1996; Moon, 1998; Tran, 2012). At the same time, many ELT professionals agree that collocations, idioms, and lexical patterns contribute to vocabulary competence as much as individual words or even more (Lewis, 1993; Dellar, Walkley, 2017; Selivan, 2018). Idioms may appear not to cause any difficulties to students due to sharing features that are typical for different languages, but the associative meanings of the expressions may be culture-specific and misleading (McMarthy, 1990). The paper discusses the nature and scope of idioms and idiomatic paronyms (also known as phraseological paronyms, idiomatic false friends, or confusable idiomatic expressions), as well as reasons for teaching them; it then suggests solutions for typical learning challenges, such as issues with retention and retrieval, lack of accuracy (mistakes of form, pronunciation errors), problems of developing noticing skills, and difficulties of acquiring idioms at lower levels. It is then concluded that the proposed teaching suggestions might prove practical for educators who work with speakers of different languages; this conclusion stems from analysing our experience of having tested the suggested techniques in multilingual classrooms in European and non-European countries.

Keywords:

Teaching lexis, idioms, phraseology, paronyms, EFL, ESL, ELT.