English idioms

Introduction

Nowadays English is one of the most important languages and it is considered as a universal one. If you know it you can be easily understood in every part of our planet. Nevertheless, there are some difficulties even for those who know English perfectly. For example, when you see or hear some phrase, you can know all the words in it but you may not know what this sentence really means. So, we should also understand idioms in order not to be found in stupid situations.

Idioms make our speech more expressive and imaginative. Having a rich vocabulary of idioms, you can not only understand shades of meaning but you also will enrich your speech and make your conversation with foreign friends more enjoyable. Idioms are very common in spoken English and informal written English, so it is important to know some of them. In spoken English, they are used in most situations, from friendly conversations to business meetings. In written English, they are especially common in newspapers because the writers want to make the headlines and articles interesting and vivid. Therefore we think that this work is actual.

The main purpose of this research is to help students of high classes to understand the value of idioms. Moreover, we would like to interest them with the mysteries of idioms.

The objectives of the study is

• To define the value of idioms examining the origin of idioms;
• To give a list of English idioms and their Russian equivalents giving the classification of idioms;
• To define the usage of idioms and to analyze the frequency of idioms' usage among students of our school.

To sum up, in our research we would like to do our personal exploration of the usage of idioms which can help us to understand them better.

The definition of idioms

According to the Longman English Dictionary idiom is a group of words that has a special meaning that is different from the ordinary meaning of each separate word. For example, 'under the weather' is an idiom meaning 'ill'. Any language has a lot of idioms. Idiomatic expressions are a vital component of English in particular. They reflect mentality and culture of the people, speaking this language.

The usage of idioms

We could find a lot of idioms, but we will give examples only about some of them which we consider the most interesting and recommend the students of high school to use them in their speech.

First, we would like to present an analysis of the work with English idioms at our school. The students of high school were given 2 exercises to do. Here you can see the tasks.

(слайд с заданиями №1)

Of course, not all pupils could do these tasks correctly. Let’s look at the results. (20 students took part in this experiment)

(% выполнения)

But as we could see the second task helped the students to understand the meaning of some idioms.

(Слайд с заданиями №2)

So, it is easier to understand idioms in the context. And we would like to continue the work with the most popular idioms and enrich the students’ speech. In order to improve their knowledge of idioms we decided to do our research of the origin and classification of  this language segment.

The origin of English idioms

An idiom generally is an expression different from its literal meaning. If we search into the origin of the idioms, we can obtain a great deal of information about that nation’s culture, history and even policy. Idioms come from different sources, from the Bible to horse racing, from ancient fables to modern slang. Sometimes famous authors such as Homer or William Shakespeare made them up to add something special to their writings. Some idioms came from different customs and others from different speech. Several popular idioms began as sayings used in particular regions of the country and spoken in local dialects. However, the name of the first author or speaker who used particular expressions is not often obvious. Some idioms go back in time to the ancient Greeks and Romans, thousands of years ago. For instance, Achilles’ heel- the meaning is the weakness, fault or vulnerable spot in one’s strong character. But the origin of this idiom goes back to the times when Greek poet Homer wrote his famous work “Iliad”.

As for the classification there are different ways of grouping idioms. We’ve found some of them and they all are in my work but for this moment I’d prefer to speak about one of them. So, in order to help students to learn idioms easier and better we propose to remember them by such groups as animal idioms, colour idioms, clothes idioms, body idioms, food idioms and others. So, we offer to learn them according to the different categories. We began by colour idioms which we placed in English room on our beautiful and colourful stand (see appendix 2). Every day our students could see and learn idioms and their task was to make up different sentences with them. And we have already had some results.  

(На слайде) Some sentences of our pupils:

1)  After watching one horror film my little brother was as white as a ghost. (бледный как полотно)

2) In my childhood I always was black and blue. (в синяках)

3) My mother thinks that a dishwasher is a white elephant (ненужное приобретение)

4) When I failed my test on Maths I got the blues (расстроиться)

5) My classmate always talks a blue streak (тараторить) that’s why sometimes I can’t understand her.

We would like to continue this work and we will propose our students other categories of idioms. We hope that our next testing will be better than previous.   

In the conclusion we should say that the origin of idioms is closely connected with people's mentality. Nowadays English cannot be considered full  without idiomatic usage. Idiomatic sentences enrich a language and the knowledge of idioms signals that the speaker knows the language on the level of a native speaker. This research proposes practical hints for pupils wishing to include in their speech different idioms because they are integral part of language which makes our speech more beautiful and close to native one.