영어 관용어의 인지 기제 교육의 학습 효과

Effect of teaching English idioms through cognitive motivation in the EFL classroom

  This study examined the reason for the ineffectiveness of teaching English idioms in the Korean EFL classroom, and suggested a new idea of teaching them, employing the cognitive linguistic theory of idiomaticity. A questionnaire-and-interview survey was conducted with 38 secondary school teachers to find their present methods of teaching idioms, and an experiment was performed with 63 high school students to find the effect of a cognitively motivated way of teaching idioms. The teachers were asked if they taught idioms through any cognitive motivation. The results showed that their teaching methods were mostly based on the traditional view that idioms are noncom positional: they just encouraged learning by memorization with little knowledge of cognitive theory. In the experiment with the students, two groups were taught ten idioms in a different way during the same time length: one group learned merely through memorization, and the other through cognitive motivation. Tests were given twice to both groups: one day and three days after the learning. The results of the tests showed that the group who learned idioms in a motivated way performed 25.5% better than those who did not, indicating that teaching idioms through cognitive motivation is much more effective than the traditional way.