1.3 Organization of the Thesis源[自-吹冰*`论/文'网·www.chuibin.com/

This thesis will try to explore the influence of idiom types and L2 proficiency on idiom comprehension among Chinese college students. It’s totally made up of five parts. Part one is generally an introduction to the background, the significance as well as the purpose of the study. Part two is mainly concerned with the literature review of idiom types, L2 proficiency and L2 idiom comprehension. Part three is about the methodology of the research, which is a crucial part of the whole thesis. It contains a detail illustration of the research questions, participants, materials and procedure. In the fourth part, the results of the experiment are demonstrated and analyzed. Based on these statistical results, the research questions put forward in the previous parts are thoroughly discussed. The last chapter is a conclusion to the whole thesis. It first discusses the major findings of the research. Then some implications from the experiment are elaborated, and some limitations as well as expectations are focused in the end to give some thoughts for the future study.

2. Literature review

2.1 Idiom

2.1.1 The Concept of idiom

The most widely recognized features of an idiom appear to be its multiwordedness and ambiguity in meaning, according to Summers (1998), idiom is “a phrase which means something different from the meaning of the separate words from which it is formed.” whereas Cooper (1999) defines it “an expression whose meaning cannot always be readily derived from the usual meaning of its constituent elements. Also, Strassler’s definition (1982) is once widely accepted that idiom is “a concatenation of more than one lexeme whose meaning is not derived from the meanings of its constituents and which does not consist of a verb plus an adverbial particle or preposition.”

These two features are more succinctly expressed as compositeness and semantic opacity by Fernado (1996), who adds one more feature: institutionalization, i.e., conventionalization of expressions which are initially ad-hoc, and in this sense novel, in meaning.