Grasping the Idea : The Use and Understanding of Figurative Language in a First and a Second Language - A Matter of Language Skills or a Matter of Age?

This essay aims to shed light on the comprehension of idiomatic expressions among pupils in secondary school and students in high school. Research performed aimed at elucidating how age, language skills, and familiarity with the concept of idioms may be relevant to the understanding of common Swedish and English idiomatic expressions. Pupils in years seven and nine in secondary school and students in high school were asked to interpret Swedish and English idiomatic expressions and to write down previously known idioms in both languages. The results indicated that the informants from year nine and high school are more familiar with the overall concept of idioms than the informants from year seven. Proper interpretations were made to both semantically opaque and semantically transparent idioms, hence, the level of transparency and compositionality played no significant role to comprehension. The discrepancy between the age groups in reference to the number of previously known idioms was marginal. As for idioms occurring in both English and Swedish, evidence revealed that if an informant knew an English idiom he or she was likely to know its Swedish equivalent too.Validerat; 20120206 (anonymous