Facing the Class

Abstract

The article is part of a larger research project which promotes an accuracy-based approach to teaching productive skills in a monolingual class of university students majoring in English language and literature. The two preceding publications dealt with grammar and vocabulary. However, idiomatic use of English remained beyond the scope of either of them. The given article with its main focus on lexis is intended as an attempt to partly fill this gap. The key concepts which capture the very essence of idioms are metaphoricity and invariableness. They respectively relate to content and structure and account for basic difficulties foreign learners encounter in dealing with this most sophisticated layer of English vocabulary. To address them, learners need to be more knowledgeable about the problem in question. The present study offers a structural analysis of lexical idioms and views them as ready-made chunks to be necessarily learned by heart and memorized in their immediate context. This is equally true of one-word, phrase and sentence idioms – they all establish close intra- and intersentential links and largely determine the structure and coherence of the text they are embedded in.