Idiomatic Expressions and Idiomaticity in Movie English

This paper has two main purposes: 1) to raise among EFL students and teachers awareness of idiomatic expressions and idiomaticity; 2) to find out what constitutes idiomatic expressions in movie scripts. Today’s researchers are fully aware that knowledge of idiomatic expressions is an important factor in elevating students’ communicative competence. In many respects, “normal ways of saying things” Langacker (2008) discusses in his book (p. 84) sets the goal in EFL classrooms. This common-sensical way of language proficiency is what all EFL students ultimately want to achieve. The concept of ‘idiomatic judgments’ will be introduced in section 2 in an effort to eliminate EFL teachers’ prejudice on idioms since their definition of idiom seems to be heavily dependent on the notion of non-compositionality. In section 3, the syntax of idioms will be reviewed. This has been vastly underrated by generative grammarians and consequently received less significance than it deserves. In section 4, an implication for EFL classrooms will be given. In order to do this, an episode of the American TV drama Lucifer (Shilati, 2019) will be used as a potential teaching material. It is expected that this class design will expand EFL students’ comprehension of idioms and help them enjoy movie English classes more.