NYS TESOL Publication: Idiom

New News in Idioms!
by Gay Washburn

I have to confess: Teaching idioms has always bothered me. Students tell me they want to learn idioms, but I have always wondered which ones to teach. Although idioms seemed to me to be an important element for my students to master, I have always been uncomfortable with textbooks that select a set of idioms and ask the students to produce them. The resulting conversations and exercises struck me as peculiar, unnatural and forced, even when the students did them correctly. Luckily, TESOL Quarterly has come to my rescue with two interesting and relevant articles on idioms.

The two articles are: “A Corpus-Based Study of Idioms in Academic Speech” by Rita Simpson and Dushyanthi Mendis in the Fall 2003 issue (Vol. 37, pp. 419-441) and “The Most Frequently Used Spoken American English Idioms: A Corpus Analysis and its Implications” by Dilin Liu in the Winter 2003 issue (Vol. 37, pp. 671-700). I found them interesting not only for the lists of idioms they provide, but also for the issues they tackle: what an idiom is, the usefulness of corpus linguistics, and some applications for the classroom. If you haven’t had a chance to read the articles yet, I’d like to tell you a little about them in the hope that you will go back and do so.

The studies
First, I enjoyed these articles because I think they’re good examples of the usefulness of corpus linguistics research. Corpus linguistics—that is, the systematic study of a corpus or collection of linguistic text—has been sneaking up on those of us in the classroom. Sometimes this work seems far removed from the classroom, with its collection and coding of large sets of electronic data and the searching with powerful concordancing software of this data. But I think these articles illustrate how useful corpus linguistics can be to us as teachers and as users and perhaps writers of materials. Corpus linguistics is changing the way we know what we know. Now, given the miracle and accessibility of computers, we can find out what people actually say (or write), as opposed to intuited usage.
Both articles review definitions of an idiom and explain the primary characteristics of idioms. Simpson and Mendis use three characteristics to identify idioms in their corpus: fixedness (parts of the idiom cannot be replaced with other elements and still mean the same); institutionalization (that the meaning was originally novel, but now has become conventional); and semantic opacity (the meaning is not understandable from an analysis of the individual parts). Liu further divides idioms into three categories (following Fernando 1996): pure, semiliteral, and literal. The meaning of the pure idioms cannot be understood by analysis of the parts. Simpson and Mendis’s definition includes only pure idioms. The two studies also differ in their treatment of phrasal verbs. Liu counts those that are opaque as idioms but Simpson and Mendis do not consider them idioms. Liu used four major English idiom dictionaries and three phrasal verb dictionaries to identify idioms to search for in his corpora.
Simpson and Mendis focused their search only on academic English as represented in the Michigan Corpus of Academic Spoken English, also known as MICASE (Simpson, et al., 2002). It has 197 hours of speech and about 1.7 million words; it includes all kinds of academic speech events from classes to advising sessions to study groups to dissertation defenses. Liu searched three corpora. First is Barlow’s (2000) Corpus of Spoken, Professional American English. This includes transcriptions of academic and professional meetings and White House press briefings. His second corpus consists of a variety of American television programs, which he and some graduate students compiled. Third, he searched MICASE. Altogether, he searched 6 million words of spoken American English.

Findings
Given this enormous amount of material, you might expect to find a lot of frequent idioms. If so, you would be disappointed. Simpson and Mendis found only 8 idioms that occurred more than 10 times (ranging from 10-17 times) in their corpus of nearly 2 million words/197 hours. Another 107 occur 1.2-2.4 times per million words. Liu, with an even larger corpora (roughly 6 million words) and a more generous definition, found only 47 items with a frequency of 50 or more tokens per million words. Another 107 had a frequency of 11-49 per million words and the other 148 had a frequency of 2-19 per million words. That’s a total of only 302 idioms, which strikes me as not only a relatively limited number, but also a very teachable number.
The lack of many common idioms, makes the task of teaching idioms both easier and harder. It is easier because we can focus our teaching on those idioms that are fairly frequent. This, however, leaves students to grapple with novel idioms on their own. It also points out the problematic nature of current idiomatic textbooks on idioms, which select the idioms randomly or based on author’s intuitions about their usefulness. In fact, Simpson and Mendis report that a review of three idiom textbooks published at the time the MICASE was compiled shows that only 25% of the idioms actually found in the MICASE corpus are taught in these textbooks.
Simpson and Mendis also examine the discourse functions of the idioms they found in the corpus. Although use of idioms occurred across all kinds of speech events, from formal lectures to study group discussion, idioms play certain roles in the discourse. These pragmatic functions, which sometimes overlap, are evaluation, description, paraphrase, collaboration and metalanguage. I think one of the reasons my students made up dialogues that always seemed so unnatural to me is that the students used the idioms without regard to their pragmatic function in the discourse. Simpson and Mendis note that certain idioms use predictable pragmatic functions, such as on that note as metalanguage to mark a discourse boundary.
Simpson and Mendis also found a certain amount of variation in form possible with idioms, even fixed as they are. The first kind of variation they found resulted from truncation, or shortening, such as the use of carrot (from the idiom carrot and stick) or haven’t the foggiest where idea is deleted. Liu cites an example of bring him up with to speed understood in the context. The second kind of variation was individual speaker performance variation. One person spoke of a side in your thorns (a thorn in your side); another walking through a landmine instead of walking through a minefield. Liu cites the example of slip of the lip (slip of the tongue). Fluent speakers, familiar with these idioms, can compensate for such truncation or presumably accidental misspeech, but how are learners to deal with them?
Both articles present lists of idioms which they feel are worth teaching in terms of their useful frequency. Simpson and Mendis have a list of 23 and Liu presents three lists, according to frequency, for a total of 302. He also presents lists of the most frequent idioms according to database. Liu uses the list he has generated to critique idiom dictionaries and teaching materials in terms of their choice of entries, the meanings given, the information of grammatical features, and the frequency of competing forms.
In summary, these two articles are great examples of research that matters to ESOL teachers. They bring us up to speed in corpus linguistics research, critique our current materials, explain some of our current difficulties in teaching idioms, and offer suggestions about ways in which we might teach idioms more efficiently and effectively. I hope I’ve been able to pique your interest and send you back to the originals.

References
Barlow, M. (2000). Corpus of spoken, professional American English. [CD-ROM]. Houston, TX: Athelstan.
Fernando, C. (1996). Idioms and idiomaticity. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Liu, D. (2003). The most frequently used spoken American English idioms: A corpus analysis and its implications. TESOL Quarterly, 37 (Winter) 671-700.
Simpson, R., and Mendis, D. (2003). A corpus-based study of idioms in academic speech. TESOL Quarterly, 37 (Fall) 419-441.
Simpson, R.C., Briggs, S. L., Ovens, H. J.,and Swales, J. M. (2002). The Michigan corpus of academic spoken English. Ann Arbor: The Regents of the University of Michigan. Retrieved June 4, 2003 from http://_www.hti.umich.edu/m/micase/.

Gay N. Washburn is currently an assistant professor teaching ESL at Syracuse University. She works with ITAs and graduate students in TESOL and is interested in most things in TESOL. <gnwashbu@syr.edu>