Although I stated I would blog about what I have learned at the University of Iowa, this posting is more inspired of some new s about a colleague of mine whose proposal was accepted by the TESOL organization to write about about teaching idioms. I have always been interested in idioms when I was growing up, and when I first became an ESL teacher, I wanted to teach them, but I realized how impractical many of those idioms were. That's when I realized that I liked them because certain idioms were only spoken by certain groups of people and not the general English speaking population of the world or certain counties. Since then, I have avoided teaching idioms directly. When I was earning my MA degree at UMBC a decade ago, I learned that idioms should be taught as vocabulary for the most part. I also learned that it was important to separate phrasal verbs from idioms. The average American English speaker usually lumps the two together as idioms. Phrasal verbs are...
Attempting to bridge the research-practice gap in English language teaching with a focus on curriculum, instructional technology, and intercultural communication.