Factors affecting saudi female efl students' interpretation of proverbs at ar-rass girls collge of arts and sciences

Abstract EN

Proverbs are figurative expressions that frequently occur in the English language, given the pervasiveness of these expressions, it is important that EFL learners can understand their meanings.

This paper sought to: (a) provide a tentative assessment of the accuracy with which a sample of Saudi female EFL learners interpret the English proverbs.

(b) identify the factors that affect Saudi female EFL learners' interpretation of English proverbs, namely, familiarity (the amount of previous exposure), concreteness, and metaphor.

The current study used a combined design, both quantitative and qualitative methods were used.

The first quantitative phase of the study collected data from 50 Saudi female EFL learners of the fourth year in The Department of English at Arass College of Science and Arts by using The Proverb Familiarity and Interpretation Tasks, where these participants rated their familiarity with a set of English proverbs and paraphrased them, as well as a background information questionnaire.

In the second qualitative phase, a structured interview revealing attitudes towards proverbs was conducted with all participants.

Descriptive statistics were used to provide a report of the participants' proverb familiarity and interpretation.

In addition, Wilcoxon signed rank test was used in order to find if there were significant differences between familiarity and accuracy scores.

The results revealed that there was a highly significant difference between familiarity ratings and accuracy scores which indicated that familiarity played a minor role in proverb comprehension for EFL learners.

Other factors such as semantic analysis, and metaphors play substantial roles in proverb comprehension.

Moreover, the analysis of the interview data revealed that metaphorical proverbs required more time and cognitive effort and posed more difficulty than the non-metaphorical ones.

The qualitative analysis of the interviews added more insights for the participants' learning of English proverbs.

The participants, in the present study, acquire their English proverbs by exposure to daily language.

Findings supports the meta-semantic approach which suggests that the speaker is required to analyze the words semantically in a given proverb.

Findings suggest that strategies for introducing both cultural literacy and idiomatic language into EFL classrooms and text books should be implemented.

The study recommends studying other factors that might affect proverb comprehension such as the semantic factors