DRAFT
Why I haven't taught, generally, idioms, sayings, proverbs, and the like to my English language students?
Most of the students I have had since beginning this career in 1993, except for the most common sayings, idioms, and metaphors (SIMs), that I and those around me use, need cultural or other referents to decode. Beginning to upper-intermediate students do not encounter or use these flourishes of language. And advanced students don't need to study or learn them with a designated teacher or through formal lessons . . . unless of course during the course of a lesson one encounters a SIM that requires explication, or a lesson's sidebar has one or several to consider to vary the routine (fun), or you want to employ a substantive filler to occupy students in solving a problem by using the language itself as their tool. Advanced students, I believe, through reading and speaking with native and regional speakers, pick up SIMs easily as occasions require.
To wit: The "subject" doesn't warrant special lesson planning or extended classroom time.
Another but not unimportant reason is that teachers of English have their own lists of most-common idioms, sayings, metaphors. Because it is their own, begotten perhaps of one's generation, geographic location, nationality, social connections, educational level, etc., the list does not match what other English speakers know and use, their most-common ones. Consider two online lessons as illustrations of this phenomenon.
Of the list of idioms Gill will read and exemplify in her video, I am not familiar with three examples in the screenshot introducing her presentation; and although a fourth I understand, I would never use it, nor have I ever encountered it to my recollection. This is not a good batting average (ref. baseball indicating poor performance).
The second example is Lucy's exhaustive lecture, er list. In her video, I got to number six in, or on, the list of 100 before I encountered something I had never heard before. Six was immediately comprehensible, so my argument about avoiding altogether colorful enhancements to communicating is not absolute; but I would wager that by the time she got to 100, there would be more than one SIM I was not familiar with, my being a lifelong student and user of (my) language, admittedly not precisely hers--which is the point.
Artificial intelligence engines produce lists of most common SIMs in whatever variety of English you prompt, and if that would suffice as a lesson, perhaps assign that for homework and compare lists of results in the next classroom meeting. Which begs the question: does one need a teacher and a classroom to have a lesson nowadays, when you can have AI give you a language lesson or be your conversation practice partner--aural, oral, textual, visual--multi-medially at a time most convenient for you?
So how does the conventional teacher cover something problematic and paradoxically easy to get to the bottom of like SIMs? Don't. It is not your job as a language teacher with the majority of students you (will) encounter. And how you help get students to practice and use idioms, sayings, and metaphors is not--in my opinion--to read, explain, give additional examples--then move to the next item on your list. Gill and Lucy are more like talking dictionaries or glossaries limited to visual and auditory channels for passive learning albeit on demand, which one can replay if you missed something the first time round. They are great for recall and as asynchronous resources.
Everyday experience also convinces me that not teaching SIMs in the online or physical classroom is prudent.
I wrote a novel with a title that was part of a saying. It comes from British English, or English English, which I had to research and find because I didn't like the American almost-equivalent of the same idea. I was not familiar with the British version, but because of aptness, plot development, and my continental audience, I chose the British expression for the book's title and not-so-cleverly hidden dramatic moments in the main character's growing awareness of self and other through reflection. The saying came to make sense from the context in which it progressively appeared.
Example two. I have dear friends my age in another country, not our own, and they are highly educated and experienced teaching professionals. I used an expression that I thought every American would know in one of my email messages, and they said they had never heard it before. I looked it up, and it seemed to be quite common. (There are online tools to research such questions.) Could it be that they are thoroughly Ivy League and I am public university enculturated from the second or third class Far West (of the U. S.)?
Three. I have had years of experience working in international and intercultural organizations outside my own country--beginning in my early twenties. Suffice to say, the object of using English among colleagues and the public in non-native places required carefully communicating--communication that leads to easy comprehension among players, who just might have something to say about your tenure and ability to get along/adapt. Provincial or specialized talk does not fly (easy to decode, right?). To aim for high and ready understand-ability is the aim, not the display of the wonderful twists and turns a language can manage when one speaks with one's native (provincial?) contemporaries.
I expect disagreement about whether or not to teach sayings, idioms, and metaphors. So be it, if only because a decision about how to teach English as a foreign language of long ago has held its relevance for almost a lifetime. My career is much like the water in a stream that passes under a bridge and disappears into the distance and cannot be called back.
Would that last thought be a way to get around troublesome SIMs and just make meaning plain and simple for most non-native language users? I'll give that some thought and try it out with my remaining, and faithful, students of this language we are actively, and virtually, sharing.
