Quote:
Originally Posted by blouen  How do you teach idioms, Naamplao? |
It is not easy to teach the meaning of an idiom. I am not perfect on the subject and others will have other techniques but to me the context in which the idiom is used is very important.
The first step is
to be able to recognize that a phrase is an idiom and not something that can be interpreted literally.
Let me create a sample paragraph....
"I have been investing in the stock market for a long time now. For the most part I have been successful but two months ago I had one stock take a dead cat bounce. Luckily I didn't invest a lot of money in that stock. It was a good lessen though. I will be more aware of a similar situation the next time it happens."
Can you find the idiom in this paragraph? Look for a phrase that just doesn't seem to make sense when you read it.
Ahhh...." a dead cat bounce" does not seem to belong here, does it?
Next step what is the paragraph about"
1. the stock market
2. my investment in a particular stock.
3. was my investment successful? What are the clues?
No...
Clue 1. luckily not much money was invested (if it was a good thing wouldn't you want to have invested more money?)
Clue 2. the phrase "For the most part I have been successful but..." the word "but" implies a problem
Now look at the idiom itself
1. does "a dead cat bounce" sound like a happy phrase? Why?
No....A phrase with the word "dead" in it does not sound positive.
2. If you take the phrase literally and you dropped a dead cat on the floor, how high would it bounce?
Not very high, if at all.
If you understand the stock market and share prices, you realize that stock prices rise and fall constantly. A "bounce" occurs when a stock falls to a support level and recovers some of its value.
If you go through this analysis you now can get the feeling that this recovery did not go well.
In fact, the meaning of the idiom, "dead cat bounce", is the action of a stock price that has fallen, rebounded at a support level just a bit, then plummets through the support level losing a lot more of its value.
Now the exact meaning of the idiom is difficult to figure out without more clues but by analyzing the context surrounding the idiom you can get a pretty good idea of what it means.
Does this help?