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โครงการรวบรวมและจัดทําวารสารอิเล็กทรอนิกส์ มหาวิทยาลัยเกษตรศาสตร์

high) respectively. Among the three types of idioms, it can be seen that all students (100%

in both Reading Comprehension Tests 2 and 3) could master the literal idioms better than
the other two types (All of them passed a passing point at 55%). This seems to indicate that

the apparent meanings of original words enhanced their understanding of the meanings
of the testing idioms as suggested by Fernando (1996). In addition, considering the diff cult

types of idioms, it appeared that fewer students (72% in Reading Comprehension Test 2)
could master the pure idioms. Interestingly, it should be noted that when these types of

idioms appeared in the contexts in which the language was less diff cult (i.e., in Reading
Comprehension Test 3), they could be comprehended better (100% of students).

When considering idioms in terms of their grammatical constructions, the result
showed that phrasal verb idiom was found the most (40% e.g., buy out, follow through,

live up to, and scare away), followed by phrasal compound idiom (19% e.g., olive branch,
clear-cut, open f re, at edge, and name of the game), tournure idiom (7% e.g., shoot from

the hip, turn the tide, drag one’s feet, and slug it out), and irreversible binomial idiom (3%
e.g., far and wide, give and take, in and out, and make or break) respectively. Another

30% found were idioms which do not belong to any classif cation (e.g., light at the end of
the tunnel, moral high ground, if worst comes to the worst, and here today gone tomorrow).

However, f ndings from this study revealed that when students made attempts to

understand meanings of the testing idioms, they did not pay any attention to the structure
of these expressions. This seems to suggest that the grammatical construction of idioms does

not play an important role in the comprehension process of these expressions. Therefore,
the discussions on theoretical concepts of the comprehension of idiomatic expressions will

be mainly based on the semantic framework in relation to the role of context.

As aforementioned, the f ndings regarding the students’ abilities and perceptions

of their comprehension of English idioms were gained from the three instruments namely,
a questionnaire, three reading comprehension tests, and a semi-structured interview.

Regardless of types, the f ndings from Reading Comprehension Test 1 indicated that students
did not have enough knowledge of English idioms when idioms appeared in isolation. On

the contrary, when idioms appeared in contexts of both Reading Comprehension Tests

158 วารสารมนุษยศาสตร์ ปีที่ 18 ฉบับที่ 1 พ.ศ. 2554