Testing the benefits of relating figurative idioms to their literal underpinnings

Second/foreign language (L2) learners appear to remember figurative idioms relatively well if they are informed of the literal underpinning of the expressions, that is, the context in which the expressions were (or still are) used in a literal sense. In the present exploratory study, ESL learners read texts accompanied by glosses which did or did not mention the literal underpinnings of idioms used in the texts, and their recollection of the idioms was tested immediately after the reading task and again one week later. The mean test scores were very similar across the gloss conditions, suggesting no mnemonic benefits of giving literal underpinnings. However, retrospective interviews with the participants revealed considerable variation in the way they had engaged with the materials. For example, several students who were not given information about the literal underpinnings speculated about those underpinnings spontaneously, while those who were given this information did not always understand its relation to the idiomatic meanings. The interviews also revealed considerable variation in the students’ perception of the purpose of the glosses, with some treating them as support for text comprehension and others treating them as input for deliberate vocabulary study. The findings illustrate how mixed-methods research that looks not just at aggregated learning outcomes but at individuals’ learning processes can help to finetune expectations about the efficacy of an instructional intervention and, ultimately, perhaps help to optimize the intervention itself.