Teaching Idioms

      I think,  teaching idioms is a real challenge to teachers' abilities. They say it's rather difficult for native speakers to learn idiomatic expressions. For those who learn English as a second language it may be just an undertaking. So teahers have to to find some really powerful techniques in order to help their students.
     My teaching experience shows that there are two things that count. The first one is how convincingly you present the idiom to your students and the second is how active the students are while practising it.

     Let's begin with the presentation of idioms. If you want your students not only understand the meaning of the idiom but also remember it you have to introduce the idiom in context. And the context has to be very, very, very good. By 'good' here I mean: 1) authentic,  2) emotionaly powerful and 3) appealing to as many senses as possible (at least, hearing and seeing).
     The easiest way to provide such context is search for a good video illustration in the Net. My favorite collection of videos is the one, presented by the Teacher on BBC. This collection contains 6 series: body idioms, animal idioms, food idioms, colour idioms, transport idioms, sport idioms and some specials. All of them are presented with sparkling British humour and are very pleasant to watch.
     If you've made up your mind to illustrate  idioms on your own then you'd better think of authentic sentences or mini-texts, containing the idioms and some pictures showing their literal meaning. As for pictures you can either google them or draw them by yourself. However it may take a little more time to find authentic texts.  One of the methods I use for this is surfing the British National Corpus (BNC). It's a collection of samples of written and spoken English. When you type a word or a phrase you get up to 50 sentences  that have been randomly chosen from authentic sources.
Here is a presentation of happiness idioms with pictures from Google and examples from BNC.

     Providing active practice of idioms is as important as their vivid presentation. Students textbooks usually contain a number of exercises such as matching the beginning and the end of an idiom or the picture and the idiom. The tasks are done in written form and students are not actively involved while doing them. What I often do is ask students to make their own illustrations of idioms. Once being shown a picture or a video they may be asked to create their own ones on the model. It's rather motivating if later on they can see their works in the Net (if there are no other opportunities the teacher may use his google account to publish them). If students are asked to make a story with idioms they can sound it using Voki, a service that allows to make your own avatar and add sound to it.
    So, if you take pains to organise a nice presentation and an active practice of idioms your students are sure to remember them and make their English more fluent and natural.