مرکز منطقه ای اطلاع رساني علوم و فناوري - The Pre-service Teachers’ Prediction of Idioms in Terms of Their Meaning: Mersin University Case

Abstract :

Idioms, one of the important items of vocabulary, are set phrase linguistic units that one cannot guess its expression from the meanings of the separate words, and gets its meaning from society and its culture. In the studies on idioms, it is drawn attention to features of idioms in terms of meaning and form. Especially, much studies on linguistic make a major contribution to language teaching. At this study, the ability of students studying at Turkish Education Department at University of Mersin to guess the meanings of idioms is taken into consideration as problem. It is tried to reveal that among graded idioms at which students have difficulty on guessing the meaning, and at which they guess the meaning easily and truly. Thus, students were applied a version of Likert scale in five groups developed by Işeri (2010). At the end of the study, it was observed that the ability of the students to guess the meanings of idioms is not at the good levels. As the students passed from the first degree idioms to the third degree idioms, the rate of correct guessing of the meaning of the idioms was getting low. At this very point, it was thought that it was major words’ that consist of the idioms to be in connection with each other in terms of meaning.