The Use Of Prepositions By Tertiary-Level Chinese EFL Learners

For many EFL learners, learning English prepositions poses one of the perennial problems. To date, however, few attempts have been made to shed light on how second language learners acquire and use prepositions. Consisting of two interrelated and mutually reinforcing studies, the present research explored respectively the developments of Chinese EFL learners’preposition use and the strategies they used to approach the preposition use. Study One attempted to capture the varied evolutional paths for different uses of prepositions. Study Two aimed to illustrate the categorization, frequency and effectiveness of the learners’preposition use strategies. The research yielded the following findings:1. The Chinese EFL learners made no remarkable progress in their preposition use during the first three years in college. However, different uses of prepositions were found to follow different developmental paths across the three years. A progressing trajectory was found for the metaphorical use and the use of "idioms" containing prepositions although they posed greater difficulty for the learners than did the other uses of prepositions.2. The students used different strategies and their use of strategies had some special features.1) As different approaches to preposition use, five categories of preposition selection strategies were found to be applied by the students:Retrieving formulaic sequences from memory, Applying rules, Turning to language feel, Translating into LI and Drawing analogy.2) In terms of the frequency and distribution of strategy use, Retrieving formulaic sequences from memory was the most dominant and frequently used approach. As to the relationship between the strategy and preposition use, it was found that the students tended to employ rule-based strategies for literal use of prepositions and memory-based strategies for metaphorical use of prepositions. In cases of set phrases containing prepositions, the learners almost always relied on retrieving formulaic sequences from memory.3) With regard to the effectiveness of different strategies, Retrieving formulaic sequences from memory was found to be the one most likely to lead to the correct preposition use; hence the use of this strategy best predicted the students’preposition performance.4) High scorers were found to use the strategy Retrieving formulaic sequences from memory significantly more than the low scorers did.The results of the study show that learners can indeed learn to use prepositions in some aspects, and this finding calls to question the claim that prepositions cannot be learned after puberty. The results further indicate that the learning of prepositions involves, to a large extent, the learning of formulaic sequences. An effective way for advanced learners to improve their preposition use is to learn by heart phrases, sentences and texts that contain prepositions. The findings also have some pedagogical value in shedding light on the efficient ways of teaching prepositions.