Lexical Inferencing Strategies Affecting the Comprehension and Production of L2 Idioms

This study was an attempt to investigate the effect of four different forms of strategy instruction on idioms comprehension and production. To achieve the purpose of this study, 120 female students at intermediate level of language proficiency were selected from among a total number of 139 through convenience sampling and based on availability. The participants were divided into five groups, and each group was randomly assigned to one of the treatment (four experimental and a comparison) conditions. Each of the four experimental groups were taught one of the four lexical inferencing strategies including form-focused, monitoring, evaluating, and meaning-focused strategies, while the students in the comparison group received no such instruction. After 12 sessions of treatment, an idioms comprehension and production posttest was administered to the participants. The obtained data were analyzed using two separate One-way ANOVA procedures. The results showed that the form-focused group performed significantly better than the experimental and comparison groups. The findings suggested that form-focused strategy instruction can be used as an effective instructional tool to help learners enhance their idiom learning. These findings may have theoretical and pedagogical implications for language learning as well as materials development.