THE IMPACT OF ETYMOLOGICAL INSTRUCTION ON IRANIAN EFL LEARNERS’ COMPREHENSION OF IDIOMS IN SHORT READING TEXTS

The present study was conducted to investigate the impact of etymological elaboration instruction on EFL learners' comprehension of idioms in short reading texts. Out of 108 EFL female learners studying at Islamic Azad University of Mashhad (Khorasan Razavi province, Iran), based on the results of an Oxford Placement Test (OPT), 60 homogenous learners at upper-intermediate level (with the age range of 18-26 years old) were selected based on convenience sampling method. Afterwards, they were randomly divided into control and experimental groups, each consisting of 30 learners. To make sure that the participants were more or less at the same level according to their comprehension of idioms, a researcher-made test was administered to both control and experimental groups to make a judgment about learners’ idiomatic knowledge of idioms in short reading texts, and the learners’ progress after offering the treatment. The treatment of the study took five one-hour sessions, during which the participants in both groups received five idioms using different instructional techniques, i.e., ‘the etymological elaboration instruction of idioms’ technique for the experimental group and traditional technique (rote learning) for the control group. The results of independent samples T-test revealed that the experimental group in the post-test outperformed the control group. The results of the paired samples T-test, moreover, showed a significantly higher improvement for the experimental group compared to the control group. It was concluded that knowledge of idioms’ etymology generally raised Iranian EFL learners' comprehension of idiomatic expressions in short reading texts.

Idioms, Etymological Elaboration, Comprehension, Iranian EFL learners, Short Reading Texts