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
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