Journal of Education & Social Policy

Expressions Idiomatic in Teaching/Training of the Languages between Marginality and Recognition
Souad BENALI-MAZOUNI

Abstract
Omnipresent in our daily life, effecient when the speaker wants to express certain subtleties of feeling, emotions or thought…. The idiomatic expressions are part of the informal language; one finds them in writing as well as in oral expression; they especially appear useful and very important in the message transmission when one seizes linguistic “original” combinations …. But for which reason are they regarded as “minor type”? Why are they perceived as a problem in language teaching/training (Arabic, French, English or any other language)? Which place do they occupy in the dictionaries? In our intervention, we will try to answer these questions and many others, those which have a close relationship to the linguistic practices but more especially the foreign civilization and language teaching concerning the intercultural one. We will consider the literal meaning and the idiomatic meaning of some chosen expressions, pertaining to various languages and cultures, we will see the difficulties as for the acquisition of a idiomatism in a foreign language while trying to translate it into other languages. We will finally insist on the importance to have in each language a dictionary of idiomatic expressions, a true access not only to the foreign language but also an opening to the other cultures. Teaching/training of a foreign language yet very did not draw. To acquire a language, its culture should, from now on, be also targeted. Such tasks require to lean still and more seriously on the idiomatic expressions. A back and forth between two languages, two cultures, the application of equivalences could, possibly, remove an number ambiguities and circumvent several obstacles.

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