The Impact of Pictorial Cues on Understanding Idioms Among Arab EFL Learners

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Introduction
Nowadays, the power of social media platforms stands not through scripts, but through images which speak a thousand words.Pictorial forms of communication are trendy nowadays, as they help in promoting the language and grasping the meanings in a very colourful, arty and attractive way.Several phone applications (apps) use countless emojis, bitmojis and stickers which are considered fascinating methods to communicate feelings and opinions to other users without articulating too many words.Emojis and bitmojis, for instance, save a good deal of effort and time with simply a single click.Users of Snapchat, for instance, often use emojis and bitmojis while texting.Users habitually use them to cheer up the receiver or just because they find them much simpler and easier than putting their thoughts into boring texts.Today, if a user receives a message delivered with a plain text, s/he may think the sender is too formal, upset or annoyed particularly when it is an informal communication with a member of her/his family or a close friend.Some users find some pictorial forms of communication such as Snapchat bitmojis somehow straightforward, while others may find them puzzling, especially if they are new to the app and/or the target language and culture.For instance, when someone receives the Snapchat bitmoji 'so jelly', as shown in Figure 1, after a friend shared some Snapchat photos while s/he was enjoying a summer holiday on the beach, the receiver may find it difficult to understand especially if s/he is not familiar with the term and Snapchat depicts the expression literally by showing a representation of a jam jar.The intended meaning in this context is feeling jealous 'slang'.By running a content analysis of social media, forms of social media language include: verbal, non-verbal, textual, contextual, pictorial and aural.Social media platforms such as Pinterest and Tumblr are principally lacking verbal language, whereas other platforms such as Snapchat are becoming gradually governed by pictorial imagery.Social media language includes a wide range of pictorial devices, e.g., animated emoticons, memes and gifs.Social media language relies heavily on visual language with a system that largely uses images to deliver meaning.Owing to their unique patterns, these images can be inferred by a huge group of users.Examining how these various factors interact on various social media sites is a helpful method of merging them.Platforms may be contrasted in terms of the types of communication they enable and those they discourage or prohibit.Platforms contain built-in limits and possibilities: if we utilise them, we must follow the template they supply.X's original 140 then 280-character restriction is an apparent example of a constraint that indirectly supported certain types of communication while making others more difficult.In contrast, Snapchat is a semi-private space, which allows communicating with others.Users describe and picture themselves for an audience of 'friends', and to make their private life accessible to other 'followers'.
According to Bourina and Dunaeva (2019), implementing modern technologies results in a revolution in the patterns of understanding, which are associated with the pictorial understanding of image, representation, and colour.This complex vigorous and multidimensional environment supports comprehending foreign languages and cultures.Language and culture are perceived only by means of real-life communication when it has potential to communicate within an authentic specific-context.It would be advantageous to consider how these forms communicate meanings when users move across different platforms; i.e., what form of language would deliver meanings more appropriately?A more verbal, textual, contextual or a more pictorial platform?Hence, the current study attempts to determine the usefulness of integrating different elements embedded in social media platforms in delivering figurative meanings and they were compared in terms of the degrees of idioms transparency they make (im)possible in relation to meaning-making.Although one platform can have different forms of cues, this study focuses on only one cue for each platform.That is, to determine the power of contextual cues and pictorial cues provided by different social media platforms, only one form of cue embedded in each platform has been examined, i.e., only texts from X and pictures from Snapchat.

Idioms
Foreign language learners often encounter idioms in daily communication.Idioms are common across languages and cultures, yet they are complicated forms of non-literal expressions (Nippold, 1991).By definition, an idiom is a group of words that contains a meaning that cannot be comprehended based on the literal meaning of single words.An idiom is a phrase that even if someone understands the meaning of its words, s/he still does not understand the meaning of the whole expression.These words are not intended to be recognised literally.For instance, when someone says, "This cost me an arm and a leg," and she still got both her arms and legs, the reader may get puzzled and not realise that it means it costs a lot of money.Also, if someone says, "s/he has cold feet", this does not mean that her/his toes are truly cold.Rather, it means s/he is nervous about something.Also, "they've got bad blood" does not mean that their blood is unclean, yet it stands for having a bad relationship or ill/bitter feelings.Hence, idioms cannot be inferred simply by considering their individual words.Thus, comprehending idioms may be problematic for EFL learners.

Transparent and Opaque Idioms
Several factors play roles in idiom comprehension in foreign language contexts, including transparency, and context of use.Transparency also known as "literalness" means how straightforward it is to recognise an idiom based on the individual words it comprises.According to Cain et al. (2005), transparency stands for "the degree of agreement between the literal and figurative meanings of an idiom" (p.67).Idioms may be sorted based on their level of transparency: 1) decomposable, 2) abnormally decomposable, and 3) no decomposable.Decomposable idioms are made of words that support their whole non-literal meaning, such as biting a bullet.
The word bite signifies doing something and the bullet denotes something unpleasant that has been avoided to do.Abnormally decomposable idioms comprise words that are metaphorically related to the inclusive non-literal meaning of the idiomatic expression, such as let the cat out of the bag.The word let represents reveal and the cat figuratively indicates a secret.Whereas, no decomposable idioms comprise words that do not mirror their figurative meaning, such as kick the bucket.Empirical evidence suggests that learners are likely to react to the first two types of decomposable idioms quicker than the last ones.
Linguists usually refer to idioms as transparent idioms and opaque idioms.Others subdivided these two categories into semi-transparent idioms and semi-opaque idioms.Transparent idioms stand for idioms that have closely related meanings to literal ones.Thus, transparent idioms are often not challenging to recognise, since The idiom back to the grind means going back to work after a break.The provided pictorial cue is a Snapchat bitmoji which shows a miner working underground to take out coal and bring them up to the top.Miner work is considered one of the most dangerous and toughest jobs.The reader may not be familiar with the word "grind", although the meaning is somewhat transparent.However, the portrayed facial expression "being bored or exhausted" with a coal mining pick axe may help in inferring the figurative meaning appropriately.

Challenges of Mastering Idioms Among EFL Learners
EFL learners may find mastering some elements of the target language somehow challenging.Although EFL learners may perform in a target-like manner for mastering the target language, they may still find English idioms challenging to use appropriately as Levorato (1993) asserted.Empirical evidence suggests that idioms are considered to be one of the standing areas which establish a considerable challenge (Adkins, 1972;Cooper, 1999;Nippold, 2003;Colin, 2006).Arabic learners of English, for instance, face considerable challenges for mastering English idioms (Hajjaj & Kharma, 1989;Awwad, 1990;Mahmoud, 2002;Aldoubi, 2003;Ghazala, 2004;Fallatah, 2009;Noor & Fallatah, 2010).There are several factors which make idioms challenging for EFL.These factors may include the unique nature of idioms, lack of cultural familiarity with idioms, the impact of the mother tongue on the target language development and insufficient exposure to idioms.

Unique Nature of Idioms
It is worth noting that idioms have unique meanings which cannot be realised from their constituent parts.Levorato et al. (2004) pointed out that idiom understanding involves learners going beyond a straightforward word-by-word understanding scheme and combining non-literal meanings into contextual evidence.For instance, a whale of a time "exciting time" in English has nothing to do with being on a whale back in its literal sense.The majority of idioms also have non-literal equivalents, which makes them even trickier to master.Native speakers may not struggle to recognise the intended meanings of idioms, whereas EFL learners may encounter challenges in guessing the intended meaning throughout the course of the target language development if they do not receive sufficient exposure to the target forms (Irujo, 1986b;Hajjaj & Kharma, 1989).

Lack of Cultural Familiarity with Idioms
Idioms largely vary across different languages.The English idiom when pigs fly, which means something impossible to happen, may have different alternatives across languages.For instance, it corresponds to If cows perform hajj on horns in Arabic, when chicken have teeth in French, when fish climbs up a poplar tree in Turkish, when the crayfish will whistle on the top of the hill in Russian, when donkey's Eid in Indonesian, in cuckoo's summer in Bulgarian, unless the sun would rise from the West in Chinese, when there are two Thursdays in a week in Danish and when it snows in summer in German, etc.More interestingly, the same language may have more than one equivalent for the same idiom, such as in the season of the apricot in Arabic and When hell freezes over in English, which both also mean something impossible to happen.This makes idioms a very complicated component for foreign language learners.Lack of cultural familiarity with English idioms is considered a serious challenge for learners to recognise and use idioms efficiently (Awwad, 1990;Huang, 2001;Mahmoud, 2002;Homeidi, 2004;Colin, 2006;Noor & Fallatah, 2010).Awwad (1990) pointed out that cultural variations across languages pose a considerable challenge for learners.Hajjaj and Kharma (1989) found that Arab-speaking learners of English often face challenges for mastering idioms because a huge amount of the idioms are culturally definite and non-corresponding to their L1.For instance, for a marriage proposal in English, someone would say 'he got down on his knees and popped the question!', but an Arabic speaker would say "he asked her hand for marriage".
In the context of social media, these cultural differences are manifest.To wish the best of luck to someone on Snapchat, a user would say good luck!break a leg! knock 'em dead!blow them away! or fingers crossed!Besides, Snapchat offers numerous pictorial symbols that represent 'good luck' across different cultures such as a horseshoe (i.e., American), Hamsa hand (e.g., Arabic), four-leaf clover (i.e., Irish), and fortune cats (e.g., Chinese) (See Figure 4 native with r lack uctors ering adequate and suitable aids and cues to prompt mastering them appropriately.Furthermore, several EFL instructors are not familiar with idioms, their meanings, origins or/and usage (Aldoubi, 2003;Liu, 2003;Andreou & Galantomos, 2007;Noor & Fallatah, 2010).
The informality of most of these idioms may also play a role in receiving less attention.Most teachers and syllabus designers focus on formal rather than informal forms.For example, being nuts about something, which means being extremely fond of something, is considered an informal expression and such idioms do not receive enough attention in classroom contexts.However, idioms are commonly used in real-life contexts such as in songs, books, newspapers, magazines, films, television and radio shows and nowadays in social media platforms.Nevertheless, television and radio shows and films do not allow communication which is extremely essential for mastering any linguistic component.Input that lacks interaction is not adequate for language development as Long (1981) pointed out.Therefore, EFL learners' exposure to idiomatic expressions in non-communicative conditions lacks the opportunity to access adequate feedback, which is very fundamental for foreign language development.

Previous Studies on Mastering Idioms in Foreign Language Contexts
A large and growing body of literature has examined idioms.The growing body of literature on idioms suggests that the majority of studies (Cacciari, 1993;Gibbs, 1993;Glucksberg, 1993) theoretically focus on the linguistic features of idiomatic expression.A large volume of research in the field adopted Lado's (1957) Contrastive Analysis or Corder's (1976) Error Analysis approaches.Several scholars carried out studies on second/foreign language learners in Arabic-English context (Hajjaj & Kharma, 1989;Awwad, 1990;Mola, 1993;Alharthy, 1997;Huang, 2001;Mahmoud, 2002;Aldoubi, 2003;Eltahir, 2003;Fallatah, 2009;Noor & Fallatah, 2010;Khalil, 2016;Alhaysony, 2017).Furthermore, some scholars examined the role of context in idioms comprehension (Ortony et al., 1978;Nippold & Martin, 1989;Bulut, 2004;Noor & Fallatah, 2010;Xie, 2017).Nippold and Martin (1998) examined idiom interpretation in isolation versus context among 475 teenagers.The results showed that idioms in context were more accurate than idioms out of context, and that correctness for both gradually increased across the target age range.Idioms in isolation caused more No Response, Literal, and Unrelated non-target-like categories than idioms in context.On the other hand, several studies examined the role of pictures for mastering idioms in foreign-language contexts (Fotovatnia & Khaki, 2012;Abbasi et al., 2015;Vaez-Dalili et al., 2017;Altakhaineh & Shahzad, 2020).Altakhaineh and Shahzad (2020) examined the efficiency of utilising images vs. online dictionaries in tutoring English figurative forms to Arabic-speaking EFL learners (n = 50).The researcher used a pre-and post-test design to assess the subjects' understanding of figurative forms pre-treatment and post-treatment.The subjects were allocated into two treatment groups: Group A (n = 25), was subjected to the figurative forms using images delivered by an overhead projector, whereas Group B (n = 25) was subjected to the figurative forms using an online dictionary and activities.Later, both groups were requested to offer interpretations of the target forms in a comprehension task.The findings showed that although both groups showed improvements on the post-test, however, Group A significantly outperformed Group B owing to the picture method used in the treatment.Furthermore, several studies (e.g., Cronk & Schweigert, 1992;Cronk et al., 1993;Vaez-Dalili et al., 2017) examined the effects of contextualisation and visualisation on the comprehension of transparent and opaque idioms.Vaez-Dalili et al. ( 2017) examined the role of (de)contextualisation and image cues for mastering transparent and opaque idioms (n = 40) among Iranian intermediate EFL learners (n = 90), which were allocated into 3 different groups: contextualised (i.e., idioms in contexts), decontextualised (i.e.idioms in isolation) and image-cued learners.The findings suggested that mastering transparent idioms was far superior to opaque idioms across the three groups.Furthermore, using images was the most successful technique, followed by contextualisation, and lastly, decontextualisation was the least successful technique.

Statement of the Problem
This study sheds some light on the effects of contextual and pictorial cues, accessed via authentic resources, i.e. social media platforms, on mastering idioms among EFL learners in Saudi Arabia.According to the best of the author's knowledge, despite the large and growing body of literature that had investigated mastering idioms and had tackled the challenging areas, the majority of the studies had examined idiom comprehension in artificial contexts.That is, they examined the usefulness of presenting idioms in the classroom with the use of different teaching methods.This study, however, examined the challenging area of understanding English idioms regarding the existence of contextual and pictorial cues in natural contexts, i.e., social media platforms.This paper could be considered to be among the first research carried out in this new context examining how transparent and opaque idioms are understood by EFL learners.This paper provides some novel insights into the realm of mastering the non-literal language embedded in social media in foreign language development context.

Research Objectives
The study investigates the extent to which Arabic speakers of English find contextual and pictorial cues embedded in social media platforms helpful tools for mastering idioms.That is, whether authentic context and pictorial cues available via X and Snapchat help in making the target meanings more transparent and hence more comprehensible.The purpose of the present study was to examine the receptive knowledge of Arabic-speaking learners of English in Saudi Arabia with respect to idioms in/out of certain contexts and with/without pictorial cues, e.g., in daily conversations via social media platforms (e.g., X and Snapchat).To determine whether the available content of social media may help in appropriately delivering the intended meaning and may be beneficial for EFL classroom-based context.

Research Questions
The current study is guided by the following questions: RQ1: Do Arabic-speaking learners of English find pictorial cues embedded in social media platforms helpful in appropriately recognising the meaning of idioms rather than (de)contextual cues?RQ2: What are the strategies Arabic-speaking learners of English use to comprehend the meanings of idioms embedded in social media platforms?

Research Methodology
To address the questions raised, a random selection of thirty female high school students in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia were recruited for this study.The participants' age range was from 17 to 18 (M = 17.6,SD = 0.5).The participants are originally from different Arab countries including Saudi Arabia (n = 10), Yemen (n = 2), Palestine (n = 4), Syria (n = 3), Egypt (n = 5), and Sudan (n = 6).The homogeneity of the participants was determined based on their performance on the Oxford Quick Placement Test (OQPT), devised by Oxford University Press and the University of Cambridge Local Examinations Syndicate (Syndicate, 2001).Nevertheless, their proficiency levels range from elementary (n = 20) to lower intermediate (n = 8) and only two of them were intermediate.This distribution does not allow making any solid comparison related to their proficiency levels.The study assesses the participants' receptive knowledge of idioms.The comprehension test required participants to offer interpretations of the target idioms (See Appendix A).The participants were divided into three groups: contextualised (i.e., exposed to idioms in context), decontextualised (i.e., exposed to idioms out of context) and visualised group (i.e., exposed to idioms with pictorial cues).Each group received the same amount (n = 24) and type of idioms (transparent (n = 12) vs. opaque (n = 12)) in different methods.The first part was designed to collect demographic information related to the participants' background (e.g., age, language spoken at home, and amount of exposure to the target language).Then the interpretation task was administered to assess the participants' comprehension of the relevant idioms.The third part includes an open-ended question to determine the method the learners often use while conferring English idioms.
A total of 24 items were randomly selected from the Oxford Dictionary of English Idioms ( 2009).The researcher administered 3 versions of the test; only one version for each group.The idioms were displayed one by one on a large screen using an overhead projector for all the participants of the same group, not individually.Participants were initially asked to watch the screen and choose the appropriate interpretation among four-option items on a sheet of paper for the appearing English idiom (See Appendix A).Each version included identical idioms and the items in the three versions are randomly ordered with some distractors added to all of them.Version A includes idioms out of context and without pictorial cues.Version B with idioms delivered in written contexts.Version C with idioms delivered with the use of visualised cues (i.e., Snapchat bitmojis) for the same items of version A and B as they are represented in Snapchat, as shown in Table 2. Participants were not allowed to use a dictionary or to consult online resources.Afterwards, the participants were asked a post-task question related to how they often infer the meanings of idioms embedded in social media platforms to find out the most common inferring method (See Appendix A).

Results
One-Way the learner groups.
.org The results of the ANOVA showed a significant difference between the groups (F = 147.181,p < 0.001) as shown in Table 4.The mean scores for the groups were as follows: idioms out of context (M = 4.50, SD = 0.707), idioms in context (M = 18.40,SD = 4.168), and idioms with pictures (M = 23.50,SD = 1.354).Figure 5 demonstrated that the visualised group outperformed the contextualised group.Whereas, the decontextualised group was the weakest group.These results suggest that providing contextual and pictorial cues can significantly improve the understanding of idioms among Arabic-speaking learners of English.The findings have implications for language teachers and course designers who seek to enhance the effectiveness of language learning materials and pedagogy, particularly in the domain of idiomatic expressions.

An example of a
Figure 5. Results of the effect of the three different techniques used across the three experimental groups Bonferroni Post Hoc Test for multiple comparisons was used to determine exactly which groups differ from each other.Table 5 shows that all mean differences between the groups are statistically significant (p < .05),as indicated by the asterisk (*) in the Sig.column.The test showed that the mean value of task score was significantly different between group A, M = -14, SD = 1.15 and group B, M = 14, SD = 1.15, (p = 0.000, 95% C.I. = [-16.82, -10.8]).There was also significantly different between group A, M = -19, SD = 1.14 and group C, M = -19, SD = 1.15, (p = 0.000, 95% C.I. = [-21.93, -16.07]).There was also significantly different between group B, M = -5.1,SD = 1.15, (p = 0.000, 95% C.I. = 16.07,8.03]) and group C, M = 5.1, SD = 1.15, (p = 0.000, 95% C.I. = [-8.02,-2.17]).Specifically, the decontextualised group had significantly lower mean scores than the contextualised and visualised groups, and the visualised group had significantly higher mean scores than the other two groups.Furthermore, the transparent idioms had a mean score of 8.63 and a standard deviation of 3.306, while the opaque idioms had a mean score of 6.83 and a standard deviation of 5.292.The t-value was 1.580 and the significance level was 0.121.This suggests that there was no significant difference in understanding scores across the groups at the 0.05 level of significance as Table 6 demonstrated.

Discussion
Turning now to the experimental evidence on the power of the cues accessible by means of social media in delivering figurative language, this study was designed to address the following questions: Q1: Do Arabic-speaking learners of English find pictorial cues embedded in social media platforms helpful in appropriately recognising the meaning of idioms rather than (de)contextual cues?
Concerning the first research question, the most obvious finding from the analysis is that the participants' performance significantly varied across the three versions: non-context, context, and pictorial-cued.The findings suggest that the participants who relied upon visual cues had achieved higher accuracy in guessing the appropriate meanings of the idioms.Others who relied upon context to guess the idiomatic meanings were less accurate.Whereas, the decontextualised group struggled to infer the meaning since no cues were provided neither contextual nor pictorial.That is, there were differences in the individuals' performance on the idiom interpretation test.Group A face challenges in understanding idioms out of context and in the absence of any visual cues.The findings suggest that the participants could recognise idioms in context more than those out of context.This suggests that context plays a fundamental role in facilitating the process of inferring many English idioms even though most of these idioms were unfamiliar to them.They found idioms in visualised cues such as back to the grind more effortless to master than when they occur in only written contexts or out of context.Consistent with the literature, findings of this research lend support to the conclusions of Vaez-Dalili et al. ( 2017) who suggested that using images was the most successful technique, followed by contextualisation, and lastly, decontextualisation was the least successful technique.
However, the single most striking observation to emerge from the data was that there was no significant difference in inferring transparent and opaque idioms across the three groups.That is, mastering transparent idioms was not far superior to opaque idiom.This can be justified by the fact that some opaque idioms were frequently used and familiar to them.Nevertheless, the results suggested that high-transparent idioms were slightly more straightforward to recognise than low-transparent idioms although the difference is not significant.The participants found more transparent idioms such as a piece of cake unproblematic to infer than less opaque idioms such as the elephant in the room.Furthermore, the participants found highly familiar and corresponding idioms to their L1 such as, strike while the iron is hot, effortless to master rather than non-corresponding idioms such as, go Dutch.It is worth noting that participants across the three groups found some culture-specific idioms somehow challenging even with the availability of the contextual and the pictorial cues.Therefore, many aspects of the languages, such as culture, history, and environment, should be taken into account when introducing idioms to EFL learners.

RQ2: What methods do Arabic-speaking learners of English often use to comprehend the meanings of idioms embedded in social media platforms?
With respect to the second question, the participants have reported that they often tend to use a wide range of techniques to comprehend idioms including guessing, L1 knowledge, and literal translation, looking for unfamiliar expressions in the dictionary, consulting online resources, among others.They also asserted that the most frequently used method was predicting the meaning of expressions from the given context, based on available verbal and/or visual materials (if any).The participants claimed that the idioms that lack meaningful contexts and were challenging to identify, led to an inappropriate understanding.
However, the participants asserted that some of the visual cues implemented in Snapchat were misleading and depicted the meaning literally which result in unfruitful understanding of idioms, such as a bitmoji depicts a lady in a laboratory for have chemistry, a lady holding a cast for break a leg, a lady on the back of a whale for having a whale of a time … etc.This leads them to infer the meanings literally.Although some of them noticed this trait and avoided any literal interpretations and realised that there are some hidden meanings.

Limitations, Implications and Avenues for Future Research
Taken together, these results provide important insights into the context of foreign language learning and teaching despite the small sample size.This involves the call to integrate into the contemporary program the models of language learning in electronic devices environment, where language learning is perceived as a process of linking materials.Language learning in a hypertextual setting is perceived as a process of joining materials, when learners have capacity to recognise the links between diverse contexts and can cope with the challenge of multilingualism.Language learning in social media is grounded on the principles of mastering context complication, in relation to authentic materials.In hypertextually, learners have a chance to shape their own constructions from the target culture, and outline their learning objectives.Using social media platforms, with its hypertextually, teachers can personalise the learning progression, making it pictorial and stimulating, which permits learners to accommodate the target language innovatively.It is an opportunity to generate a link between texts, contexts and users within authentic resources.Learners can create their own hypertext, they can organise materials the way they understand it, using diverse resources as a method to incorporate text with audio-visuals.Social media language makes it potential to create in learners' novel, language-specific, meaning-making, means as Bourina and Dunaeva (2019) also recommended.
Integrating hypermedia materials for teaching a foreign language entails that this material has to be continually treated by several schemes of memory.This suggests that if a text additionally comprises several pictorial materials at the short-term recall phase, memorisation will take place.This makes it potential to provide a wide range of learning styles and advance the learner's own cognitive style.Instructors must consider the learners' styles including visualised learners.Visual learners typically prefer images and videos, whilst verbal learners prefer verbal materials.This multidimensional environment delivers entirely novel opportunities for accessing authentic materials related to the target language, culture, history, etc.It mirrors the interested area in a multidimensional manner.
Knowledge of the meaning of a large assortment of idiomatic expressions and the capability to put them in a proper context are among the distinctive features of English native speakers.EFL learners who attempt to misuse or avoid idiomatic expressions will always look non-native as Laufer (2000) asserted.EFL learners who desire to attain high levels of proficiency must master more about idiomatic expressions and overcome their challenges, communicate with English native speakers and access rich and authentic resources of idioms.Mastering idioms must be the key objective of any program that seeks to accomplish higher EFL communicative proficiency.It is significant for textbook designers and instructors to present idioms despite their degree of formality in a communicative method and explicitly show how, when and where to use them appropriately in a native-like manner.Therefore, it is desirable for textbook designers and EFL instructors to closely pay close attention to idioms and to present them in diverse contexts to support learners in overcoming this difficulty efficiently and achieving a high level of English proficiency.Idioms must be introduced systematically and competently.
Learners must be offered further precise and convenient accounts of the meanings, origins, and usage of idioms together with proper practise to facilitate recognising and producing them successfully.A relevant and rich context with stimulating activities and helpful pictorial cues plays a role for better comprehension, greater fluency and higher accuracy.
Figurative language must be introduced primarily in early stages of foreign language development and it should not be introduced separately.For instance, idioms must be introduced daily and linked to every vocabulary lesson, such as vocabulary related to body parts, colours, plants, and animals.Instructors must make it clear that these literal meanings might deliver metaphorical meanings in certain contexts and provide sufficient explanations using mind mapping and exercises.They can present the new word in different meaningful contexts and show the intended meaning for each, such as the word rat can occur as a lab rat, smell a rat, rat race, rat on someone, and to look like a drowned rat.Instructors can also use Pictionary games in the classroom to teach the target forms.
Considerably more work will need to be done to determine how different cues can be merged and look at how they would collaborate on different social media platforms to better deliver the intended meanings and how communicative competence can be enhanced using this multidimensional technology.

Conclusion
The findings of the current study revealed that visualisation was the more effective method for mastering idioms than contextualisation.On the other hand, decontextualisation was the least effective method.That is, the findings suggest that most of the participants are likely to recognise idioms in visualised contexts more than idioms out of context.The participants found Snapchat bitmojis considerably helpful in interpreting a number of meanings of the idioms although some of them are still misleading.The findings also support the conclusion that context plays a significant role in activating the process of successfully recognising English idioms.Furthermore, one of the more significant findings to emerge from this study is that some high-transparent idioms were slightly more straightforward to recognise than low-transparent idioms although the difference was not significant.The findings of this study have several significant implications for future practise associated with understanding how idioms must be presented to EFL learners in multidimensional ways.(1978)

Table 2 .
A

Table 4 .
Results of the one-way ANOVA comparing the effect of three different techniques

Table 5 .
Results of the Bonferroni post-hoc multiple comparisons across the three groups.

Table 6 .
Results of the t-test of learners' performance across the three groups on transparent and opaque idioms