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Conceptual metaphor is a linguistic theory proposed by cognitive linguists Lakoff and Johnson in their work Metaphors We Live By (1980). Based on this theory, our study explores the idea of using the conceptual metaphor approach for teaching idiomatic expressions in French as a foreign language. This article presents an experiment conducted with a group of young adults to demonstrate the effectiveness of the conceptual metaphor approach compared to other teaching approaches and to specify that learners’ categorization of expressions based on categories of conceptual metaphors can be more effective in facilitating the acquisition of these lexical elements by learners.