The challenge of idioms

 

One of the many areas of difficulty for learners of English is the wealth of idioms they have to learn to use so they can speak natural English.

We, teachers, must find some creative ways of presenting and making idioms memorable, which is by no means an easy task.

Sometimes a situation arises which lends itself to focusing on an idiom if only because it is the only natural way of responding. However, this doesn’t happen so frequently in a school environment so we have to be resourceful and persistent.

I find that an image is perhaps the ideal way of imprinting it on students’ minds and a good deal of practice to anchor it.

I will illustrate with a couple of examples.

The first idiomatic phrase is to be on cloud nine. For this one I decided that prolonging the “mystery” would work well. So here is the PPT slide:

https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/18IL82cKTVlvNGzU-rUQJY7dW_vA0yAQA-4Mo1DBU6Xc/edit?usp=sharing

Following the slideshow, invite the students to imagine they are up there, on cloud nine and ask them to write something that led to such bliss.

She had been trying for years to have a baby and just a few minutes ago her doctor informed her that she is expecting.

 

The second phrase is to look daggers at someone. Again I made a slide and provided the following example hoping it would trigger some challenging responses:

My students looked daggers at me when I announced there would be a test every week for the whole academic year.

https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1ReLZ38_oPGagHEmoHd0-Nr-7lG7KL7ghPvKbVJebgPk/edit?usp=sharing

Formal writing can be enjoyable

 

Teaching can be a romantic business in that you may always seek to clothe what would appear to be a cumbersome task in appealing terms. In this sense, I am an incorrigible romantic.

My focus is yet again writing for a language exam at an advanced level, particularly when the candidates are teenagers and still struggling with formal writing in their native language.

It is not very often that a teacher gets the opportunity to be playful about it but if you look out you might come across texts – newspaper articles, poems or even advertisements –which, if properly used, might provide excellent material for introducing or practising language or register useful in formal writing tasks.

The following was recently published in The Guardian.

  https://drive.google.com/file/d/1oEfOAzprqaMgquQjbfkMMPU9nUT6DmLL/view?usp=sharing                 

It is a facetious exchange between someone versed in bird singing and an imaginary reader who responds to the information provided.

There is enormous potential in the text in various respects: witty repartee, colloquial language and a number of crucial issues to boot – music, birds, drugs, using animals in experiments, sounds during the coronavirus quarantine. So you could challenge your students by asking them to use different expressions from this dialogue to keep a conversation going.

(you don’t say, just think, really, I wonder if …, don’t say)

Now the question is how one could exploit the text in order to elicit more advanced writing. You could ask your students to write a serious article based on this dialogue, which will be published on a science website. This will involve leaving out all irrelevant details (summary skills), reordering the important facts in a way which the reader will find easy to follow (organisational skills)and employing different linguistic devices from those used in the original text.

It is exactly those differences in style that you need to focus on and either elicit them from the students or point them out to them so that they can use them in an appropriate way in their article.

I am supplying a sample here which I wrote for my students. I would make sure I won’t give away any of this before the students have tried their hand at the task. You will see some of the devices used highlighted.

 https://drive.google.com/file/d/1XC3d5IpvSHk8oNtpdqCSx1oWDIRFHLu5/view?usp=sharing

 

Conclusion: writing can be less of a bore for students if we, teachers, only tried harder.