Cross-cultural Variation as a Variable in Comprehending and Remembering Figurative Idioms

Before the 1990s, very little attention was devoted to figurative idioms in EFL literature. Idioms were largely neglected because of three (meanwhile outdated) assumptions. Firstly, language was generally conceived as a dichotomy of grammar 'rules' on the one hand and 'lists' of individual words on the other, and multiword expressions such as idioms did not fit into this dichotomy. Secondly, figurative expressions were thought to be merely ornamental, a way of dressing up messages in a colourful way. Consequently, they were considered to be relevant only to very advanced students, who could use idioms as the icing on their linguistic cake. Thirdly, it was generally assumed that the meaning of idioms was absolutely unpredictable. Because of this alleged arbitrary nature of idioms, it was believed they could not be taught in any systematic or insightful way. The only available option for students to master idioms was to 'blindly' memorise them, and as a result idiomatic expressions had limited appeal in educational linguistics. Meanwhile, insights from cognitive linguistics and corpus linguistics have fortunately trickled down to the field of applied linguistics, and these new insights have inspired more pedagogically sound approaches to L2 idioms. Firstly, the grammar-lexis dichotomy has been discarded