Analysis of Student’s Ability in Understanding English Idiomatic Expressions for Speaking

Abstract

The aim of this research is to describe the student’s ability in understanding English idiomatic expressions and to elaborate analysis upon the student’s perception in understanding English idiomatic expressions. The method of this study was quantitative and qualitative. The writer collected the data by giving the test to the students which consist of 20 multiple choice tests and a questionnaire regarding their perspective about idiomatic expression, counting the errors that students made in the test then classified the result of students based on five criteria in methodology, summarized the perspective of students in understanding idiomatic expressions for speaking. Then put it in the data with the explanation. The result of this study shows that English department students batch 2017 at Hasanuddin University are enough in figuring out English idiomatic expressions and it can be categorized as “fair”, with a total percentage of 57%. The data shows that only one student got ‘Very Good’ with the percentage of 81-100%, Ten students got ‘Good’ with the percentage 61-80%, fifteen students got ‘Fair’ with the percentage of 41 – 60%, three students got ‘Bad’ with the percentage of 21-40% and one student got ‘Very Bad’ with the percentage of 0-20%. Based on the questionnaires given to the students regarding this test, most of the students claimed that English Idiomatic is very important to learn and quite hard to be learned due to contradicted meaning to what it has been written. For all these consequences, it is really recommended for the lecturers and departments to put this material as additional discussion or material in learning Programme to help students have deeper understanding about idiom.