Abstract

English is now becoming a global language, especially in Vietnam where it is required in the curriculum. However, there are many challenges that students have to face when learning this language, and one of them is understanding idioms. An aim of our research was to determine the similarities and differences between English and Vietnamese idioms containing the word “fire” in syntactic and semantic features. A
total of 116 English and Vietnamese idioms were collected from dictionaries, literature, and the Internet, and categorized according to their many syntactic and semantic features. The findings show that in syntactic features, Vietnamese idioms tend to use prepositional phrases and sentences more frequently than English idioms, which heavily rely on verb phrases and noun phrases, and there aren't many adjective and adverb phrases in either language. Furthermore, in semantic features, actions are the most prevalent theme in both English and Vietnamese idioms, whereas neither language uses mood frequently. This study also suggested some strategies to help English as second language learners improve their learning idiom process.