APPLYING EXPRESSION ANALYSIS IN METAPHORICAL VOCABULARY COMPREHENSION

Metaphorical vocabulary of the English language is often a problem for EFL students both in receptive and productive skills. One possible way of overcoming this difficulty is conscious development of learning strategies, which aid comprehension and production and lead to the autonomy of students in the domain of the use of metaphorical expressions in the English language. One of the strategies that can be used in metaphorical vocabulary comprehension is analyzing expressions, which implies the parsing of a multi-word chunk into words, the analysis of each individual element and checking if all the elements of the multi-word chunk have a literal or metaphorical meaning. The paper is based on a one-year research conducted at the Department of English at the Faculty of Philosophy in Novi Sad, during which English language students were interviewed in order to determine in how and to what extent they analyze metaphorical expressions as a strategy in understanding metaphorical EFL vocabulary.