This paper primarily focuses on the description of the results of a study conducted on ten Chinese university students ESL learners to investigate  whether or not cultural context has a significant impact on university students’ ability to remember and understand English figurative idioms as part of English as a Second Language instruction in China. Since Idiom  is a kind of language block which concord rich cultural elements and the figurative idiom whose meaning cannot be easy inferred by the usual meaning of its constituent elements, so the present study was based on the relationship between culture and language, the origins of the idioms and their cultural connotations. As some scholars’ studies have shown before, knowing the origins and the source domains of the idioms can enhance the learners motivation, then their comprehension and retention of idioms are improved. The present study also demonstrates that the cultural context can facilitate learners understanding and memorization of the English figurative idiom.