Innovation in Language Learning

Prepositions are grammatically multifunctional and polysemous (conveying not only place and time, but also other notions). They are also frequently misused by learners of foreign/second language (L2 henceforth).  The learners may choose a wrong preposition, or drop a preposition when it must be used – both of course maybe be influenced by their first language use (L1 henceforth), or maybe partly attributed to low proficiency in English.

This study aims to add to the empirical evidence concerning the real challenge that preposition use presents. In order to find out which prepositions pose problems to Arabic-speaking university students, a learner corpus was compiled and analyzed following Granger’s Integrated Contrastive Model. The corpus was compiled at the College of Languages and Translation (COLT) at King Saud University in Saudi Arabia. The texts were composed by students majoring in the Arabic/English translation programme. The compositions were produced in exam-like situations by 61 students at their final year of study. Online Oxford Placement test was given to the participants before starting the writing sessions which were conducted on a weekly basis. The proficiency test was intended to explore the effect of the learner proficiency on the use of prepositions. The corpus consists of 186 writing compositions (descriptive, narrative, and argumentative) totaling 55,080 words. The corpus has been automatically tagged using CLAWS7 part-of-speech tagger for certain syntactic information. Furthermore, the corpus texts have been manually tagged for “error”.

Using WordSmith Tools, prepositions in the corpus have first been identified and the most frequent ones were shortlisted. The frequency with which learners across different proficiency levels produce prepositions was identified. This was done to show which prepositions were mostly used, underused, and misused. The study particularly explored patterns of use in relation to L2 proficiency and L1 patterns. 

The findings show four patterns in the use of prepositions, and reveal the immense role of L1. For example, at was clearly underused and particularly misused in its temporal sense. The study also revealed that Arabic-speaking learners of English exhibited a marked tendency to use the preposition in erroneously to conceptualize CONTAINMENT when SUPPORT schema mediated by on was supposed to be used.