DOES TEACHING IDIOMS IMPROVE LANGUAGE FLUENCY?

Abstract

The present study investigated the effect of explicit idiom instruction on the fluency of upper-intermediate EFL learners. Eighty-four university students in Uzbekistan participated in this study and were assigned either to an experimental group which was offered focused idiom instruction integrated with communicative activities over a period of 12 weeks or to a control group which pursued the usual curriculum without any idiom instruction. The idiom instruction group showed significantly greater gains in speaking rate, less disfluency, and written lexical density than the control group. Students also said they were more confident and less nervous when speaking in English. The results indicate that whole‐chunk instruction of idioms, as opposed to word‐by‐word instruction, could lead to higher fluency. This can be applied to EFL curriculum development in which idioms should be introduced through authentic materials and communicative activities rather than as an optional or supplemental module