حمدالله راوند

The present study aims at investigating the relative efficiency of three techniques of teaching idioms; etymological elaboration, use of pictures and contextualization applied to the EFL students of three different levels of proficiency; beginning, intermediate and advanced levels, considering short- and long-term retention. The study tried to find the most suitable technique for each of the proficiency levels mentioned. To this end, sixty participants (20 for each proficiency level of beginning, intermediate and advanced) of the study were selected from among the students of College Language Institute in Rafsanjan. The subjects‟ age ranged from 15 to 25 years. The subjects of the three groups at three proficiency levels were taught 60 unfamiliar idioms through three techniques of pictorial elucidation, etymological elaboration and Persian translation. Each of the techniques mentioned was used to teach 20 idioms and after applying each technique, a quiz was administered to show the students‟ short term retention of the material covered. After two weeks, a posttest involving the covered materials was also administered to all three groups. This test indicated the subjects‟ long-term retention of information in different groups. The data thus gathered was used to compare the relative effectiveness of either of the techniques for each of the levels with regard to short-term and long-term retention. The result of the analysis showed that in short-term retention a significant difference exists between beginner and advanced participants while the context group was an exception and no significant difference was detected between its sub groups. The result of long term retention showed that significant differences existed between all levels of context (Sig=.046<.05), etymology (Sig=.000<.05), and picture group (Sig=.001<.05).