Prepositional error analysis in EFL students' written compositions

Abstract

This research project, developed at Uniminuto University, emerged from the difficulties that the lexical category of prepositions causes to EFL learners in general. The researchers were interested in analyzing how a group of students used prepositions in a written task taken from one of their exams. In order to approach the understanding of this phenomenon, the researchers based the analysis on the interlanguage hypothesis, which states that second language learner’s errors are a key to understand their interlanguage (linguistic system) in terms of prepositional usage. As for the methodology of analysis, researchers decided to use the method known as Error Analysis, which is a systematic procedure for analyzing linguistic samples by using taxonomies. 55 EFL learners participated in this research, the group belonged to the course Anglophone Language and Culture VI and the students came from four different groups. After completing the analysis, the conclusion is that prepositions presented a difficult challenge for all the levels of proficiency within the selected courses, and intralingual strategies of learners mainly produced such errors.