Swedish adolescents' understanding of concrete and abstract English proverbs

Sammanfattning: The aim of this essay is to find out how well Swedish adolescents understand concrete and abstract English proverbs, if concrete proverbs are easier to understand than abstracts ones, if there are differences between boys’ and girls’ and between monolinguals’ and bilinguals’ understanding of these. In a multiple-choice questionnaire, Swedish 7th to 9th graders read 15 short stories followed by three choices. They were then asked to mark the alternative they thought best described the proverb in each sentence. The results in this study show that, generally, concrete proverbs are easier to understand than abstract ones and that proverb understanding steadily increases in adolescence. Furthermore, the difference between boys and girls as a whole was not significant, nor between monolinguals and bilinguals. However, differences between different language groups were immense.