A Study on Criteria to Effectively Acquire Conventional/Idiomatic Expressions in Movie English

Abstract

This paper aims to investigate the types of conventional/idiomatic expressions preferred by Korean college students when using movies as learning materials. Five high-intermediate college students were recruited for the study, and the materials used included the animation <i>Sing 2</i> (Jennings & Lourdelet, 2021) and expressions from YouTube. The participants underwent two tests, starting with instruction on the animation, before being followed with a test containing 30 items from it. In another test, they were presented with the same 30 items from YouTube videos. The results revealed that the YouTube items were significantly easier to memorize and recall compared to those from the animation. The participants provided comments regarding their relatively higher scores from the expressions on YouTube. These comments highlighted three factors: first, the shorter length of expressions in YouTube; second, the simpler syntactical structure of YouTube’s content; and third, the practicality and usefulness of YouTube expressions from a pragmatic (pragmalinguistic and sociopragmatic) perspective. These findings have important pedagogical implications for the EFL classroom. It is recommended to consider the participants’ feedback: 1) prioritize shorter utterances, 2) incorporate grammatical knowledge even when teaching conventional or idiomatic expressions, 3) emphasize treating utterances as cohesive units. The study contributes valuable insights into incorporating movies in language learning.