Chinese EFL Learners’ Retrieval of English Idioms in Language Production

DOI

10.2991/assehr.k.201214.095How to use a DOI?

Keywords

English idiom, retrieval, literal meaning, figurative meaning, language production

Abstract

While EFL learners’ comprehension of English idioms seems well-documented in the literature, much less has been written about their production of idiomatic phrases. To investigate how idioms are retrieved from the mental lexicon of second language (L2) learners during language production, the think-aloud data of 35 proficient Chinese learners of English were recorded and analyzed in a Chinese-English sentence translation task. The results show that in this cross-linguistic idiom production, both the literal meaning and the figurative meaning can be used to activate the idiom itself. What’s more, literally translated concepts tend to be retrieved literally, and figuratively translated concepts tend to be retrieved figuratively. This indicates that the to-be-translated concept can prime the retrieval of the idiom base form to some degree. The findings suggest that the hybrid model of idiom production still holds for L2 idiom production even when tested with cross-linguistic tasks.

Copyright

© 2020, the Authors. Published by Atlantis Press.

Open Access

This is an open access article distributed under the CC BY-NC license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/).

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TY  - CONF
AU  - Qingyan Zhang
AU  - Shidong Shan
PY  - 2020
DA  - 2020/12/16
TI  - Chinese EFL Learners’ Retrieval of English Idioms in Language Production
BT  - Proceedings of the 2020 6th International Conference on Social Science and Higher Education (ICSSHE 2020)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 500
EP  - 506
SN  - 2352-5398
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/assehr.k.201214.095
DO  - 10.2991/assehr.k.201214.095
ID  - Zhang2020
ER  -