Exploring Iraqi EFL college students' idiomatic awareness and use

الملخص EN

One of the most interesting topics to investigate in linguistics is the usage of idiomatic expressions.

The area of idiomatic expressions is considered as a complex area of study that students focus on after studying the other areas in linguistics.

Since idiomatic expressions require a higher understanding to know their meanings, they may cause some problems to some students.

Consequently, this study is an attempt to investigate the awareness and the degree of mastery of idiomatic expressions by Iraqi EFL college students at Al-Mustansiryiah University, College of Basic Education, Department of English.

The study is focused on measuring the idiomatic proficiency of the third and the fourth stage students for the year 2019-2020.

The study concluded that the students who participated in this study faced a difficulty when it came to answering the questions that required from them to provide the meanings of idioms when they appear alone and in context.

In addition, the students also faced a difficulty when they were given pure idiomatic expressions and they were required to produce sentences in which they use the idiomatic expressions