Conceptual metaphoric meaning clues in two idiom presentation methods

Cognitive linguists have been exploring how giving learners information about the motivation of L2 idioms can facilitate comprehension and retention. Results overall are encouraging, but the relative effectiveness of different proposals has not yet been examined. In this chapter I report a small-scale experiment that was set up to compare the relative effectiveness of two CL-inspired idiom presentation methods. In both conditions learners were presented with idioms that were grouped under conceptual metaphors (CMs). In one condition the meaning of each idiom was given, while in the other condition the learners were encouraged to use CM clues to guess the meaning before it was explained. Post-test results suggest that the addition of a guessing task is likely to enhance the effectiveness of presenting idioms in CM groups. The participants were relatively unsuccessful at guessing the meaning of the idioms correctly, though, and this indicates that a fair amount of guidance and feedback is required for this method to pay off in the classroom.