Help, the English Language-teacher is Dyslexic (held.com.br)
Not only knowledge of vocabulary and idiomatic expressions is important for language fluency. Being able to work with possible metaphoric meanings of what is written or said is just as important, maybe even more. It helps covering the gaps where knowledge runs short.
A lot is said about how knowledge of vocabulary and idiomatic expressions is important for text interpretation and understanding language in general. Lots of words are also spent on the importance of learning in context.
There is little doubt that a rich knowledge of vocabulary and idioms is an important factor in understanding and producing language. However, there are always moments where this knowledge is not enough.
The first thing that come up in most peoples minds is look it up or ask someone, a teacher. But, what if this isn't possible? Actually, more often it isn't possible than that it is. Moreover, even when it is possible, the process is often to difficult and to slow. It is where thinking in metaphors comes in. Trying to find a metaphoric meaning for words that don't seem to make any sense in the context at hand, very often show you the meaning of that word in that context and very often one of the meanings that can be found in a dictionary. This makes thinking in metaphors to understand words and texts at least as important as knowing many words and idioms for understanding others.
That's not all. apart from making the process of reading and understanding more efficient. It also results in a more efficient process of acquiring and enriching ones vocabulary and knowledge of idioms. It is more time efficient and a process in which vocabulary and knowledge of idioms increases automatically, pretty much unconsciously. On top of that, it is learning in context by nature. The possible meaning of an expression is derived from how it fits into the context. Therefore, it matches with the idea that reading is good for enriching vocabulary. Actually it works in two ways. One is, the more one reads the easier it becomes to understand what one is reading. Another is that, getting into a text, wanting to understand and being eager to find out what comes next, stimulates guessing for the meanings of words, multi word expressions like idioms and proverbs. For proverbs, as a mater of fact, it often is very clear that their meaning is metaphorical.
When I explain these things to my pupils, most of the time, they start trying to find possible metaphoric meanings for expressions that, at first, don't make sense in the context they find them in. After that it is most of all a matter of, the more they do it, the better they get at it.