Challenges and Strategies of Acquiring English Idioms for EFL Undergraduate Saudi Students

Nahla Nadeem, Shahd Almowalad

Abstract


Learning idioms is one of the key areas in acquiring English language vocabulary and achieving language proficiency.  In spite of their great importance in acquiring fluency, they are often neglected in the EFL classroom.Therefore, the aim of the present study is to investigate the challenges facing EFL Saudi students in learning English idioms and the effective strategies that they can utilize to understand idiomatic expressions. The subjects were 50 male and female Saudi EFL students at the Department of English enrolled in the first semester of the academic year 2022/2023 in King Abdulaziz University- Rabigh branch. The researcher prepared a questionnaire to identify the strategies employed by students to facilitate learning idioms and to explore the difficulties that they faced during their learning. The study findings showed that the participants had great difficulty in acquiring and understanding idioms. Moreover, study results also revealed that the most commonly used strategies were guessing the meaning of idiomatic expressions from the context, learning idioms outside the classroom, breaking them into parts to guess their meaning and translating them into the first language.


Keywords


idioms, figurative language, vocabulary learning strategies, Saudi EFL students

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References


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