The Relationship Between Understanding Opaque and Transparent Idioms and L2 Learnersʹʹ Reading Comprehension

This study was an attempt to examine the relationship between L2 learners’ reading comprehension and understanding 2 types of idioms: opaque and transparent. A TOEFL test was given to 49 senior B.A. students of English, the results of which divided them into 2 groups of proficient and less-proficient reading comprehenders. Then, they were asked to read 30 short texts, each ending with an idiom fragment (e.g., He gave it . . . for the idiom to give it a shot), and were requested to choose the proper option: the idiomatic, the literal, or the figurative. Subsequently, 185 freshmen, sophomores, juniors, and seniors were presented with the same texts to compare their figurative competence. Results showed that the proficient comprehenders outperformed the less-proficient ones in comprehending both the transparent (F = 23.313, df = 48, ? = 0.05, p = 0.00) and the opaque idioms (F = 25.107, df = 48, ? = 0.05, p = 0.00). Also, the seniors overrode the other 3 levels who had roughly demonstrated an equal performance (F = 38.909, df = 184, ? = 0.05, p = 0.00). Findings may bear a part in illuminating the process of idiom comprehension by the revelation of the relationship between idiom undestanding and text comprehension.