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The use of idiomatic English is an important factor for students who wish to both produce and understand English on a level similar to native speakers, and therefore to achieve a high score on the IELTS exam. What is idiomatic English? Does it always have to be demonstrated through the use of clichéd phrases like “every coin has two sides”, or should we consider more providing students with more nuanced examples?
In a broad sense, idioms are simply phrases which have ambiguous meanings. We might also consider individual words which require disambiguation to be a form of this. Consider, for example, all the ways in English one might describe a person's intelligence or 'wit'. We might say that he is a 'bright' lad, that she is 'no slouch' when it comes to a subject, or that his or her wit is 'scintillating' or 'sharp'. The dictionary definition of 'sharp' would usually be applied to a pair of scissors, but it can also describe the taste of cheddar cheese, or the tongue of a spurned lover. On the other hand, while the wheel of sharp cheddar could also be described as 'round', there are some who might 'roundly' refuse to eat it.
The skillful use of such phrases should be considered an essential part of using and understanding the English language well. A student who is able to effectively use words with ambiguous meanings, so that they can produce and comprehend them in both speech and in writing, is a student who is likely to succeed in the IELTS test. The use of structures which provide clear disambiguation for these can provide a helpful exercise for teachers and learners. To introduce students to this, an instructor might start with a simple matching exercise, where students select the correct meanings for a potentially ambiguous term. Other possible teaching techniques might involve matching two halves of a comma splice, the first with a word or turn of phrase which has an ambiguous meaning of an idiomatic sort, with the second half consisting of phrases that cause disambiguation. For more advanced learners, they might be asked to write the second half of such phrases themselves, or to write the entire structure.
Anyone can look up phrases such as 'putting the cart before the horse' or 'it’s raining cats and dogs' and memorize them, but that's not really very skillful. The English language contains far more nuance and breadth of ambiguity than that, and it's necessary for students to understand more subtle sorts of idiomatic English in order to demonstrate this skill during the IELTS test.
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