Over the years I worked with struggling learners in New York City’s schools, I always counted among the students on my rosters a complement of English language learners. Observing them across time, I noticed that all but a very few struggled with idioms from American English. Idioms are, arguably, one of the most difficult if not the most difficult figures of speech to master: they are not literal, and as abstractions they are difficult to interpret because they don’t bear any resemblance in most cases to the concept they describe and represent.
Which is why, when I started using E.D. Hirsch and Joseph F. Kett’s book, The Dictionary of Cultural Literacy, I wrote up worksheets on American idioms and attached them as short, do-now exercises (they take five to ten minutes at the beginning of a class period and help with transitions between classes) to as many of the lessons as I could.
So, here is a Cultural Literacy worksheet on “Don’t Look a Gift Horse in the Mouth”. This is still, I think, a very commonly used idiom, and is easy to explain conceptually, which will help students make the jump from the figurative to the literal and back again on this worksheet, and, this teacher hopes, to many of the other of its type I have posted and will post over time.
If you find typos in this document, I would appreciate a notification. And, as always, if you find this material useful in your practice, I would be grateful to hear what you think of it. I seek your peer review.
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