Title: Learning idioms functionally: a genre-based approach
Creator: Cynthia Zocca DeRoma (English Language Program Lector)
Language: English
Summary: In a nutshell, this book is one piece of a larger project for learning and using English idioms.
More specifically, it is targeted at graduate students and scholars who consider themselves second-language users of English and would like to sound more idiomatic when using the language in their academic and professional contexts. “Idiomatic” here means making language choices that are similar to what someone who considers themself a native or highly competent user of English would make. This involves pronunciation (like individual sounds, stress, intonation), lexicon (words, phrases, formulas), syntax (phrase and sentence structures), semantics (meaning), and pragmatics (what’s more or less appropriate in each context to convey a certain meaning).
This project uses a function-oriented approach inspired by genre-based pedagogy (Hyland, 2007; Swales, 1990, among others), which calls for explicit understanding of a text’s structure and choices employed to achieve certain goals. It can help students learn idioms that can be used in the functions most relevant for their academic and personal lives.
Existing genre-based materials in EAP typically target writing (e.g., Swales & Feak, 2012; Morley, 2020), and because idioms are usually regarded as a feature of informal spoken language, they are rarely included. There have been attempts to extract idioms from corpora (Haagsma et al., 2020; Minugh, 2014), but they have not highlighted teaching. Existing pedagogical materials tend to present idioms in lists (like Ayto, 2009) or mostly categorized by semantic field, not functions, like McCarthy & O’Dell (2017). Although the latter publication includes a few functions, more functional materials are needed for graduate students.
This book will present selected idioms organized based on functions they can be used in. These functions were chosen to meet the needs of its target audience, namely graduate students and scholars. Definitions and examples were also designed with this audience in mind.
As an ever-evolving electronic Open Educational Resource, this book will be constantly added to and adapted based on classroom experience and user feedback. Feel free to share your thoughts by contacting cynthia.deroma@yale.edu.
Acknowledgements: The project this site is based on was initially funded by a fellowship from the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) Dean’s Office and the Center for Language Study (CLS) at Yale University. It grew out of work developed in part with my Yale English Language Program colleagues James Tierney, Jaime Parry, Elka Kristo Nagy, Lauri Lafferty, and mainly Anna Moldawa-Shetty. Through Instructional Innovation Grants from the CLS, I was also able to get additional help from Katherine He and Ilmo Caldas. I would also like to thank the Yale FAS Dean’s Office and my CLS colleagues Fernando Rubio, Mary Jo Lubrano, David Ortega, Nelleke van Deusen-Scholl, Elizabeth Johnston, and my fellow lectors Hsiu-hsien Chan and Mika Yamaguchi. Finally, feedback from my students over the years and audiences at the TESOL International Convention and the CGC Summer institute provided invaluable insights for improvements.