Frequencies

http://visualidioms.blogspot.com/



The frequency with which an idiom is used by native speakers is a very important criterion in the learning process. Encourage your students to look at the frequencies. The easiest way is a quick Google search. For example, the idiom paper over the cracks (http://visualidioms.blogspot.cz/2013/08/paper-over-cracks.html) gets 221, 000, 000 hits if searched on Google. It is safer to check out some corpora, though (BNC http://www.natcorp.ox.ac.uk/or COCA http://corpus.byu.edu/coca/) or a paper dictionary (such as Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English). The most frequent expressions should be given priority.