A Comparative Analysis for Teaching Idioms: Intuition, COCA, and a Book

A Comparative Analysis for Teaching Idioms: Intuition, COCA, and a Book

This article reports comparative results of native English speaking teachers’ intuition, an idiom book, and online corpora analysis for idioms. In order to investigate their differences, the intuition of 30 native English teachers was examined in terms of frequency, collocations, and registers for five idioms from the idiom book, Against All Odds, in comparison to the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA). In addition, the idiom book’s information on definitions and phraseology with the same five idioms was compared with COCA analysis to see whether the idiom textbook can sufficiently provide linguistic information. This study found that although teachers’ intuition showed collocations were better in providing specific contexts to convey meaning than COCA examples, COCA analysis shows valid results for frequency and registers. Thus, both COCA and teachers’ intuition may need to complement one another. It also indicated that the idiom book does not have enough information about definitions and phraseology; thus it needs to provide more detailed examples within the usage contexts. Based on these findings, this research provides English teachers and idiom book authors with useful insights for effective English idiom teaching using online corpora.