STEERING CLEAR - AVOIDANCE IN THE PRODUCTION OF IDIOMS

In order to test the assumption that even very advanced speakers of a second language tend to avoid producing idioms, fluent bilinguals who were native speakers of Spanish and had learned English as adults were asked to translate passages containing idioms into everyday conversat ional English. Some of the idioms had exact equivalents in Spanish and English, some were very similar, and some were totally different. It was hypothesized that 1) subjects would use their knowledge of English to produce many idioms; 2) more idioms that were identical in both la nguages would be produced; 3) subjects would use more idioms that are frequently heard and semantically transparent, and fewer colloquial id ioms. Results support the first two hypotheses but not the third. Disc ussion of avoidance strategies shows that even when idioms are not use d we cannot speak of avoidance in the same sense in which it is used i n the literature on communication strategies. Implications for teachin g idioms are discussed.