Design of a booklet to teach idioms in conversation classes to third-term students of the english language and literature school at Universidad de Cuenca

Abstract

Idioms form part of the English language making it more colorful and vivid; as most of the time, these expressions describe a situation in a better way than literal words. Since idiomatic expressions are in everyday conversations, their teaching should be seen as an important element, especially for those people whose aim is mastering the target language; this is the case of third-term students of the English Language and Literature school at Universidad de Cuenca. For the purpose of introducing idioms to this target group, a booklet that compiles the most commonly used idioms has been designed. To start the collection of those idioms, ten categories were established to limit their search. From this, three hundred idioms were gathered which, in turn, went through a process of filtration using the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) narrowing them down to one hundred twenty idioms. This group of idioms, divided in their categories, was analyzed by eighty native English speakers by means of surveys, in order to obtain the final group of the eighty most commonly used idioms. This group of idioms was the basis for the development of this booklet.According to the native English speakers’ answers, the categories which were most popular are: love with 639 checks out of 640, followed by giving advice with 638, and school with 634.