The Performance of Iranian EFL Learners in Producing and Recognizing Idiom-Containing Sentences

This study aimed to investigate how Iranian EFL learners performed in producing sentences containing idioms and whether they had any problems in producing such sentences. This query, subsequently, raised the question of whether idioms influenced the participants’ grammaticality judgment on idiom-containing sentences. For this purpose, firstly, the writings of 24 learners were investigated for a period of one term and the problematic features of idioms were detected; proportionately, grammatical errors outnumbered the others. Secondly, 35 participants were tested on a 40-item grammaticality judgment test containing 10 items for each sentence type – with-idiom grammatical, with-idiom ungrammatical, without-idiom grammatical, and without-idiom ungrammatical sentences. Comparing the mean scores and the results of the paired-samples t-tests indicated that idiomaticity might influence the grammaticality judgment of EFL learners. Some implications of the research results are provided at the end.