ABSTRACT
This chapter introduces a variety of effective micro-strategies and techniques that research has identified. Given that noticing is an important process for learning lexical items, including idioms, teachers should help students learn and practice noticing and identifying idioms. One easy activity is to find a passage or excerpt from a corpus or some other natural language data that contains some interesting idioms. When helping students learn to decipher idioms' meanings by using pragmatic and conceptual knowledge, the teacher should provide whatever assistance is necessary, including making sure the students understand all the words in the idiom and the literal meaning of the idiom. For intermediate and advanced students, when feasible have them conduct a corpus search to find authentic examples of the idioms they are learning. Dramatizing idioms can also be a very effective and interesting activity to help students understand the differences between an idiom's literal and figurative meanings.
