Assessment of English Idiom Comprehension among University Students in Unguja.

Amos, Ngoge Tabley (2022) Assessment of English Idiom Comprehension among University Students in Unguja. Doctoral thesis, The Open University of Tanzania.

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Abstract

Understanding English idioms is essential in mastering the language. Despite idioms being extensively studied in the African context, showing the importance of idiomatic competence, studies on how Zanzibari students comprehend idioms are still very limited. Therefore, the objective of this study was to assess the comprehension of English idioms among University students in Unguja, which will lead to increasing their English proficiencies. It includes the extent of students’ comprehension of idioms, factors affecting comprehension of the idioms and whether inherent features of an idiom influence students’ comprehension. The study adopted a quantitative approach and a descriptive research design. The researcher used questionnaires and cloze tests to collect data from 180 respondents from three universities in Zanzibar; the State University of Zanzibar, Sumait University, and Zanzibar University. The findings revealed that the respondents’ performance in idiom comprehension was below average. The results showed that the respondents performed better in idioms presented with an enabling context than those presented in isolation, i.e. without an enabling context. The results also showed that the inherent factors such as ambiguity, transparency, and compositeness of idioms influenced the comprehension of English idioms. The findings from this research have several implications for the students, lecturers, syllabus designers, material developers, and researchers. Idioms should be emphasised in classroom instruction, introduced in vocabulary lists, and provided more exercises to motivate learners to apply various effective language learning strategies.

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