Chinese L2 Idiom Learning Through Academic Listening

This study adopted a pre-test, post-test, control-group design to investigate whether Chinese learners could incidentally learn unfamiliar idioms through listening to a recorded lecture. Learners’ (n = 120) language proficiency and prior idiom knowledge were homogenized by a proficiency test (HSK) and an idiom pre-test, respectively. Six weeks after the pre-test, the experimental group was exposed to an audio recorded lecture in which 18 target idioms were embedded, whereas the control group was not. Both groups then completed a post-test to evaluate their learning outcomes. Six participants in the experimental group also received a retrospective interview in which listening strategies used for idiom comprehension were examined. The results demonstrated that (1) the mean score of the post-test in the experimental group was significantly higher than that in the control group, indicating that learners could incidentally acquire idioms from the lecture; (2) Chinese idioms with direct English equivalents were the easiest to learn, followed by those with some and no component words in common with English idioms, indicating that cross-language similarity has a significant effect on idiom learning; and (3) learners tended to use both cognitive and metacognitive strategies for idiom comprehension. This study provides insights for incidental learning of idioms.