In the new issue of TESOL Journal is an article by Fatima Alali and Norbert Schmitt that discusses teaching idioms. "Because many idioms occur relatively rarely, each idiom’s frequency was checked in the British National Corpus to make sure it was relatively common" (p. 158). I've listed below the first 10 idioms used along with their frequencies in the BNC and COCA. For each corpus, I present the frequency per million words in the genre where the individual idiom appears most frequently. Sometimes this was spoken, but it varied a lot from idiom to idiom. With verb-based idioms, the frequency includes all forms of the verb.
Idiom
|
COCA
|
BNC
|
[pay] the piper
|
0.29
|
0.69
|
[make] no bones
about it
|
0.18
|
0.30
|
[mend] fences
|
0.44
|
0.57
|
life and limb
|
0.34
|
1.15
|
ivory tower
|
0.87
|
1.45
|
down in the dumps
|
0.25
|
0.48
|
[dwell] on the
past
|
0.16
|
0.19
|
[cast] a long
shadow
|
0.24
|
0.29
|
run of the mill
|
0.22
|
0.48
|
off the hook
|
4.00
|
3.39
|
Do these strike you as "common"?
The paper concludes, "formulaic language is an important component of discourse," a point with which I take no issue, but this is not the same as saying that particular formulas are important. The study makes a number of good points, but the focus, the teaching of idioms, is one that needs a rethink, not so much in how its done but in why it is done at all.
The paper concludes, "formulaic language is an important component of discourse," a point with which I take no issue, but this is not the same as saying that particular formulas are important. The study makes a number of good points, but the focus, the teaching of idioms, is one that needs a rethink, not so much in how its done but in why it is done at all.
Past posts on idioms here.
