고등학교 영어 교과서에 나타난 관용어 연구

Abstract

The purpose of this thesis is to analyse and classify English idioms in high school English textbooks using a spoken corpus, in order to find out how each textbook author selects idioms for th high school textbooks, and what kind of principle they use to choose appropriate idioms for high school students. Chapter 2 of the study reviews the definitions of idioms based on past theoretical works, and also examines three properties of idioms based on syntactic, semantic and pragmatic features, Finally it presents classifications for idioms based on their structure, function, and transparency. Idioms are expressions whose meaning cannot be easily derived from its constituent parts, so it is not easy for EFL learners to understand the meaning without cultural background, The difficulty in understanding of idioms is mainly caused by semantic characteristic. Semantic properties are studied through three factors: compositionality, transparency, and metaphoricity. Another characteristic of idioms I would like to emphasize in this thesis is the pragmatic function of idioms. In fact, idioms in discourse have many interactional functions such as evaluation, paraphrasing, collaboration, and metalanguage, Idioms are exclusive expressions that their literal counterparts, Furthermore, the study of pragmatic functions of idioms would have a great pedagogic value for students shod are studying in the mainstream of Communicative Language Teaching approach. Chapter 3 of the study presents the classifications of idioms in the high school English textbooks and compares each proportion of classifications of those idioms according to each section(reading section, culture section. and speaking and listening section respectively) and then compare the ratio of idioms used in the textbooks to the one used in T.V. drama scripts to find out the overall frequency of idioms used in textbooks. Lastly, the study presents the frequency of idioms used in textbooks using a spoken corpus to find out how close the idioms of textbooks are to the idioms used in real life. The highest proportion of idioms used in textbooks is phrasal verbs, which reflects how phrasal verbs are used in real life. Another point we have noticed is that tournure idioms used in textbooks show a high degree of variety, which could indicate not only the diversity in English idioms use but also the subjectiveness of material writers when it comes to selecting idioms for writing textbooks. In conclusion, I do not want to overgeneralize my study since the corpus I use for this thesis is relatively small-around 1000,000 words in it. However, at least I revealed the imbalance between the frequency of idioms used in each textbooks, and my original purpose has been accomplished. Nevertheless, I can not suggest a useful principle for choosing appropriate and useful idioms for textbooks, and I think it is far beyond my scope and approach of my thesis. However, I would like to suggest to use corpus data when material writers choose idioms for textbooks. If we consider frequency and range to be important criteria for idioms, our students would have better opportunities to study more useful idioms.