This paper primarily focuses on the description of the results of a study conducted with sixty Iranian adult EFL learners to investigate how the reading strategies and pragmatic elements are likely to govern and characterize the comprehension and interpretation process of English idioms with and without contextualized reading. It also intends to determine the role of cultural mappings and the extent to which Iranian EFL learners' knowledge of cultural idioms is affected by their L1 when they try to construct their own meanings. The researchers came up with some interesting inferences about such idiomatic expressions by the use of descriptive statistics and analyzing the participants' metacognitive comments in four phases.

Keywords: Idiom, Comprehension, Reading strategies, Context, Culture mapping