Arab Educational Information Network

This study aims at finding out the role of Close Reading Strategy (CRS, for short) in teaching idioms to EFL university students. This aim is supposed to be achieved as follows: 1) Identifying the Close Reading as a strategy for teaching EFL idioms. 2) Finding out whether there is any significant difference between the achievement of the experimental group and that of the control group in the posttest. 3) Finding out whether there is any significant difference between students’ achievement at the recognition level and their achievement at the production level, in English idioms. 4) Finding out whether there is any significant difference between the achievement of male students and that of female students in English idioms. Three null hypotheses have been formulated and verified in order to achieve the aims of the study. A sample of 60 EFL second-year university students that represents 52.63 % of its original population has been selected from the College of Education for Humanities at Tikrit University, equalized in a number of variables, and distributed randomly into two equal groups, i.e. experimental and control groups. The two groups have studied the same selected short passages about idioms for a period of 12 weeks, during the first course of the academic year 2019- 2020. The experimental group has been taught according to the CRS, whereas the control group has been taught according to the conventional method. An achievement posttest is constructed, validated, and applied to the two groups of students, at the end of the instructional period. The required data has been collected and treated statistically. The obtained results are as follows: 1) there is a significant difference between the mean scores of the achievement of the two groups of students in the posttest, and in favour of the experimental group. 2) The students’ achievement at the production level is better than their achievement at the recognition level, in English idioms. 3) There is not any significant difference between the mean scores of the male students’ achievement and that of the female students’ achievement, in English idioms. Finally, the study ends up with some conclusions and recommendations. (Published abstract)