The bottom line: Are idioms used in English academic speech and writing?

Many researchers with English as an additional language (EAL), as well as EAL teachers and students, believe that idioms are not used in English academic speech or writing. By 'idiom', they usually mean an expression that is figurative, opaque, multiword, largely fixed, and institutionalised, in keeping with traditional EAL textbook definitions. By contrast, researchers addressing multiword expressions in academic corpora have frequently used...