THE PEDAGOGY OF EDO IDIOMATIC EXPRESSIONS

ABSTRACT

This study examines the use of Edo idiomatic expressions and their importance in Edo teaching. An attempt is made to look at the use of Edo idiomatic expressions among the final year (Edo) linguistics students in the Department of Linguistics Studies, University of Benin. This is in order to ascertain the relationship between the use of idioms and language teaching and learning. We hypothesized that teaching idioms with specific strategies will help Edo learners to understand and produce idioms and that knowledge of idioms improves the learners’ language proficiency.

To justify these hypotheses, investigation was conducted using two kinds of Questionnaires; the teachers’ questionnaire and the students’ questionnaire. The first questionnaire is composed of seven questions and administered to seven teachers at different University/College and secondary school respectively. The second questionnaire consists of thirteen questions and administered to thirty-three (Edo) students at the Department of Linguistics studies, University of Benin. The discussion of the result has shown that the best way to teach Edo idiomatic expressions is to teach them how to use the pragmatic aspects of the language, and teaching Edo idiomatic expressions with some specific strategies will help learners to understand the use of idioms and to produce idioms accurately.