Application of A Cognitive-visual Approach for Teaching English Idioms to Russian Learners

The article is devoted to working out new approaches to teaching English idioms to Russian students for whom English is not a major discipline. The authors conditionally distinguish three difficulties, namely cultural, lexical and semantic, which are the basis of this study. Traditional methods are not suitable for teaching English idioms due to the difficulty of studying this branch of philology. Having analyzed Russian and, in part, foreign research findings, the authors elaborated a cognitive-visual approach in teaching idioms the purpose of which is to motivate students to get familiar and use idioms deliberately, to make this process more
productive and creative and as well as to reinforce idiomatic material by means of its visualization. As a result, the study considered various ways of graphical representation of phraseological units. Moreover, the study identified their specific features. The concept of "micro-polycode phraseological environment" shows the relationship between the use of visualization in teaching English
phraseology and the need to disclose the semantics of phraseological units. One of the benefits of this study is that the authors defined the concept of «micromultimodal idiom environment» and traced the connection between the use of visualization in teaching English idioms to students and the necessity of finding out the idiom origin.