Leila Erfaniyan Qonsuli and Mostafa Bahraman, Kashmar Higher Education Institute, Iran

In teaching languages, if we only consider direct relationship between form and meaning in language and leave psycholinguistic aside, this approach is not a successful practice and language learners won't be able to make a successful relation in the real contexts. The present study intends to answer this question: is the teaching method in which salient meaning is taught more successful than the method in which literal or figurative meaning is taught or not? To answer the research question, 30 students were selected. Every ten people are formed as a group and three such groups were formed. Twenty figurative expressions were taught to every group. Group one was taught the figurative meaning of every expression. Group two was taught the literal meaning and group three was taught the salient meaning. Then three groups were tested. After analyzing data, we concluded that there was a significant difference in mean grades between classes and the class trained under graded salience hypothesis was more successful. This shows that traditional teaching methods must be revised.

Teaching, Graded Salient Hypothesis, Figurative expressions, Language