Fundamental linguistic principles for the teaching and learning of verbal idioms in Spanish as a foreign language

We first give a brief introduction to the current state of the teaching of idioms in ELE manuals; how they are dealt with in two reference works: the Marco comun europeo de referencia para las lenguas: aprendizaje, ensenanza y evaluacion and the Plan curricular del Instituto Cervantes; and the aspects that need to be revised in didactic materials. Focusing on verbal idioms, we propose a teaching-learning method based on their morphology, their syntactic function, and the semantic relationships of antonymy and hiponymy-hyperonymy. Besides, we point out the need to consider their signifiers and signifieds for the study of marked and unmarked variation, and the mechanisms of metaphor and metonymy on which they are based. The main aim is to show a set of linguistics-based theoretical considerations which will be useful for teachers of Spanish as a foreign language in the teaching of verbal idioms in relation to their characteristics. We conclude that 1) a knowledge of the morphology, syntax and semantics of verbal idioms forms an essential base from which to attain phraseological competence; 2) the morphological classification and syntactical and semantic analysis of verbal idioms allows the teacher to introduce and work on them in an organised manner that is related to curricular content, as well as enabling students to learn starting from a previous knowledge of the foreign language and of universal psychological phenomena; and 3) the observation of the variation, mental image and formation mechanisms of verbal idioms, units also existing in the student's mother tongue, is an essential tool for the acquisition of competence.