Independent thesis Advanced level (degree of Master (Two Years)), 10 credits / 15 HE credits
The aim of this thesis is to find out if Swedish students in the senior level of compulsory school,
with English as their second language, have receptive and productive knowledge of English idioms
involving body parts. The idioms chosen are based on the model of Glucksberg (2001) as well their
frequency in the British National Corpus (BNC), four with a high frequency and four with a low
frequency. According to Glucksberg, idioms are categorized into four groups, non-compositional
idiom, compositional transparent idiom, compositional opaque idiom and quasi-metaphorical
idiom.
Four groups of students were given a questionnaire with eight different idioms, two from
each category. They were to answer if they knew the meaning of the idiom and to produce a
sentence with that specific idiom. The result shows that the compositional transparent idioms have
a better result than the non-compositional and opaque idioms. It also shows that the idioms with
high frequency in the BNC have better results on the compositional transparent and the
compositional opaque idioms, whereas the non-compositional and the quasi-metaphorical idioms
have a better result on the low frequency items in the BNC. The receptive knowledge of all the different idioms were higher or much higher than the productive knowledge. In all of the groups the girls have a better result than the boys in English. This is can also be shown in statistics from Skolverket, the national agency for education, where girls have a better average grade than boys. In three out of the four groups, students who are monolingual have a better result than the bilingual ones.
2014.