English idioms and their Russian equivalents

Comment: Task 1 is best done individually. In Task 2 the opportunity is
provided for pair work in the multilingual class. Afterwards results can be compared in plenum concerning those idioms, which are comprehensible when "translated" into English from various.

Exercise C

Task: Express the underlined sections of the following text with
language which expresses the same meaning more or less.

Example: I was feeling a bit down in the dumps - I was feeling a bit depressed

I was feeling a bit down in the dumps because it was raining cats and dogs, so I went to see Bill. Bill drinks like a fish because his work drives him up the wall. He is an EFL teacher. But he would never leave you in the lurch. Today I found him like a cat on hot bricks because he was bored. We decided to kill two birds with one stone by going to the pub and the launderette. We had a bone to pick with the barman in any case because he had forgotten to reserve the dartboard for us the previous day. We decided that not to go to the pub in protest would be just cutting off our noses to spite our faces. We did not want to make a mountain out of a molehill either.

Comment: This exercise is best done in groups. Learners should be encouraged to use the context for meaning clues rather than puzzling over the surface meaning of the idiomatic units devoid of context. The passage has been deliberately contrived to provide lots of semantic clues: for example, if it is raining one tends to feel depressed rather than elated, and one is more likely to feel depressed if it is raining heavily rather than lightly. Again, the "two" birds with one stone are picked up by the two nouns "pub" and "launderette". For this reason, another approach to the exercise would be for the teacher to take the class through the reasoning processes by which meaning may be inferred from context by paying attention to anaphoric, cataphoric and exophoric reference.

Exercise D

Task 1): Arrange these proverbial expressions into pairs of opposite (or at least "near opposite"!) meaning:

1) No man is an island

2) Necessity is the mother of invention

3) Spend and God will send

4) The more, the merrier

5) We are ships that pass by night

6) He who hesitates is lost

7) You can't make a silk purse out of a sow's ear

8) Many hands make light work

9) Too many cooks spoil the broth

10) Fools seldom differ

11) Where ignorance is bliss, 'tis folly to be wise

12) A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush

13) Look before you leap

14) Great minds think alike

15) Two's company, three's a crowd

16) A man's reach should exceed his grasp

17) Look after the pennies and the pounds will take care of themselves

18) We can't go through life with our heads buried in the sand

(Answers are: 1 & 5, 2 & 7, 3 & 17, 4 & 15, 6 & 13, 8 & 9, 10 & 14, 11 & 18, 12 & 16)

Task 2): For each of the following two proverbs find a proverb in the
above list which is very similar to it in meaning?

19) Faint heart never won fair maid

20) Fools rush in where angels fear to tread

(Answers are: 19 & 16, 20 & 13)

Comment: This exercise is again best done in small groups or pairs. Learners should be encouraged to look for "easy" pairs first, rather than going through the list one by one. Sometimes the lexical items are clues to the contrasting pairs (e.g. 1 & 5, where "ship" and "island" function as mutual clues and cues). The exercise can be made less demanding by the teacher prompting and helping the learners in this way. Sometimes the lexical link is not quite so obvious, but nevertheless can be uncovered (e.g. 4 & 15, where "two, three" cue "more"). Note, how "fools" in 10 contrasts with "great minds" in 14, whereas within 20 the contrast is between "fools" and "angels", a contrast which may not be at all obvious to all learners, involving as it does what Leech calls "historical meaning" of the word "angel". Learners should be encouraged to puzzle over this and access their world knowledge, but the teacher must ultimately be prepared to provide elucidation. It is less important how many of the pairs learners get right than that they get to grips with the detailed semantics of these proverbial expressions, becoming conscious of both literal surface meaning of the individual parts and the total metaphorical meaning of the expression. In this respect reference to how L1 expresses the same ideas may be helpful. A tolerant attitude to some "second best solutions" should be adopted by the teacher. For instance, 1 and 18 could also go together as opposites, and this solution is rejected only because 11 and 5 form a poor pair of opposites. This exercise can be used as a point of departure for discussion in various directions, and has certainly been far from exhausted when the tasks listed above have been done. The exercise thus provides a lead-in to these literary texts, excerpts from which could be read to show how the expression was first used. Experience proves that if such expressions are not to go in one ear and out the other, then intensive work of this nature is necessary. It is interesting to uncover the basic image underlying these expressions which in some cases is not obvious, for example, the ostrich in 18, the metaphorical force of "mother" and the sense of "invention" (i.e. "initiative", "inventiveness") in 2.

I would like to offer one final exercise to show how the metaphor approach towards idiomatic language may be extended to teaching vocabulary more generally, not only to firmly fixed idioms. The point I wish to make is that certain lexical fields can be applied to various contexts in a way which is not always realised. It is in this way that words acquire a range of meaning, even if the proficient language user is not aware of this, precisely because the given non-linguistic context already delimits his or her meaning expectations for various lexical items. Situational and communicative approaches to language teaching often stop short of showing how vocabulary learned for a particular context can be reapplied in others, although this is what is continually being done in language use, for example, as mentioned above, when the economy is discussed in terms of the lexis of sickness and health.

The following example exercise would be intended as a follow-up to a comprehension passage done in the previous lesson and seeks to activate the slumbering vocabulary recently encountered. It takes the vocabulary of emotion as used in a passage from a novel dealing with the death of a young boy, and places it in a very different context, namely a football match. Cognitive effort is thus required by the learners to lift vocabulary out of one context, perceive its semantic characteristics and apply it appropriately in another context. Below is a condensed version of the comprehension passage.

Comprehension Passage to precede Exercise E

It was about three weeks after my little brother had died. Barely were we all sitting together in the living room when my mother and aunts began talking about Edward. At first their voices were subdued, but gradually they rose as the women became more and more excited, and the words came flooding out. "Yes," cried my Aunt Lucy and my mother in chorus. He was too good to stay with us, too good. He was a saint!" Carried away by their own emotion, they became almost ecstatic in their exaggerated utterances. I sat there very quiet and afraid, I too was carried away by the emotion; I felt feverish and my eyes grew moist. My father was perfectly still. Once in a while I glanced at him. He looked very upset and he didn't join in the conversation. I knew there was going to be an incident. The tension mounted. Suddenly he rose to his feet. His eyes flashed violently.

"Stop it," he said, and real anger was in his voice. "Stop talking about him like that. He wasn't a saint; he was just an ordinary boy, guilty of wrong like anyone else, and I won't have you talk about him like that." The underlined words represent those that will be required in the following exercise. To what extent the teacher would single these out for pupils and focus attention on them is up to him or her and the level and ability of the class in question. Of course, there are other vocabulary items pertaining to emotion in the passage (e.g. "moist", "flashed", which it has not been possible to incorporate into the exercise. This is in the nature of things if the following contrived passage is to be both short and reasonably natural.

Exercise E

Task 1): Fill in the blanks in the passage below with the underlined words and phrases from the passage above. Use each word or phrase once only. You may change the morphological form of words (e.g. tense and aspect of verbs, number of nouns) or the grammatical class (e.g. you may make a noun from a verb or an adjective from an adverb etc.).

(The passage is presented below with the blanks completed)

Once in a while I go to see a football match. Last Saturday I joined the thousands of fans flooding into St. James's Park to watch Newcastle United play Leeds United. I arrived two minutes before kick-off, so I was barely in time. The first few minutes of play were rather subdued, but then the tension mounted, the crowd cried out in chorus, and, carried away by the emotion, I joined in. Soon Newcastle was feverishly attacking the Leeds goal. The Newcastle fans became almost ecstatic when their team scored. However, the goal was disallowed. This upset the Newcastle fans, who believed the referee had been guilty of showing favoritism, and there were some violent crowd incidents as angry fans ran onto the pitch.

Comment: As a further exercise for an advanced class learners could be asked to continue the football passage for themselves, trying to use some more vocabulary items from the original passage.

Alternatively they could be asked to paraphrase the vocabulary items used for both passages as follows: half the class would paraphrase the vocabulary as used in the original comprehension passage, and half as used in the football passage. This will underline for learners how the same words actually mean very different things in the two passages, but that there is a unifying common thread of meaning between them in the two contexts; For example, "upset" in the original passage means something like "deeply grieved", "near to tears with grief", "sad and angry". In the football passage it means (as a verb) "to annoy", "to irritate", "to exasperate". Note also the difference between "to feverishly attack a goal" and "to feel feverish", between a "violent incident" and "eyes flashed violently". Learners should be alerted to the processes of metaphor and metonymy at work here, for these are the processes by means of which the proficient language user finds words
for thought, and which we as teachers usually expect our learners.

Exercise:

Using the list of idiomatic expressions given below

a) make up a story;

b) make up dialogs.

Try to use as much idiomatic expressions as possible.

to be in a bind box;

to keep one's eyes peeled;

to go at it hammer and tongues;

to lose one's temper;

to take it on the chin;

to turn thumbs down;

to paddle one's own canoe;

big frog in a small pond;

by word of mouth;

to burn the midnight oil;

bent out of shape;

to bite off more then one can chew;

to jump all over someone;

until you are blue in the face;

to be all ears.

The next task is to render the poem using the idioms under study.

They walked in the lane together,

The sky was covered with stars.

They reached the gate in the silence,

He lifted down the bars.

She neither smiled nor thanked him

Because she knew not how:

For he was just a farmer's boy

And she the farmers cow.

To broaden the students' language awareness of idioms we can suggest the following exercises:

I. Insert the missing element; use each idiom in a sentence.

shoot ... one's mouth make ... one's mind

fly ... one's handle prick ... one's ears

go ... one's head turn ... one's nose

II. Supply the necessary words.

play ... /действовать наверняка/ keep ... /скрывать/

drop ... /упасть замертво/ go ... /спятить/

take .../застать врасплох/ go ... /умереть/

think ... /хорошенько подумать/ make ... /удостовериться

make ... /быть высокого мнения/

III. Give Russian equivalents for:

back and forth once and for all

up and down on and off

to and fro then and there

through and through one and all

over and above all and sundry

now and again first and foremost

IV. Think of fifteen idioms that initiate with the preposition in

V. Insert articles if necessary.

take ... dislike to produce ... impression on

take ... liking to keep ... secret from

take ... fancy to cast ... glance on

make ... fuss about make ... attempt at

lend ... hand to pay ... visit to

VI. Analyse the structure of the idioms; compare the three groups from the viewpoint of grammar.

gain ground take an interest take the trouble

give way run a risk get the hang

get wind take a chance have the cheek

leave effect win a victory have the guts

take heed make a stand spill the beans

do good stretch a point know the ropes

mean harm lend a hand take the lead

eat dirt produce an effect take the starch

take action keep a secret tell the truth

lose interest make a crack blow the gab

give consent lift a finger save the day

make pretence cast a glance

VII. Define the meaning of each idiom; use thorn in a story.

take pains take chances

make friends make arrangements

speak volumes take steps

take decisions make plans

VIII. Arrange the following into groups of semantically related idioms.

at best at least at first

at last at worst at latest

at most at farthest at nearest

IX. Reproduce an episode from the book you are reading; employ the given idioms.

come to a head take into account

arrive at a decision come into existence

fly into a passion come into sight

X. Recall some more idioms of a similar structure: Verb + Preposition + Noun.

fall in love take by surprise

keep in check keep in mind

take in tow roll in money

XI. Give an idiom for each number.

1. pass away 5. fall for

2. take to 6. see through

3. make out 7. chime in

4. give in 8. pass on

XII. Group the idioms according to their structure.

in any case, in a whisper, in full cry, at all costs, on no account, in bad shape, at any rate, into the bargain, in deep water, at the same time, under the weather, in the long run, in a tight corner, at a moment's notice, in no time, by no means, on excellent terms, in a bad way, in a flash, in good humour, at arm's length, in the end, At close quarters, on a high horse, with breakneck pace.

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