Avoidance Of Prepositions In Compositions Written By Chinese Students

English is a language of prepositions. English prepositions are characterized by polysemy, multi-function and high frequency. These characteristics make prepositions a most difficult target language (TL) item for Chinese students to learn.Cognitive linguists, structuralists and functionalists have studied English prepositions from different perspectives. Their researches are theoretically significant and help Chinese students understand English prepositions more profoundly. Unlike the above researches, this current study focuses on preposition use rather than preposition understanding so that prepositions can be investigated from a new angle. While prepositions such as over, up, on, and across are considered in the previous studies, the preposition of is researched on in this paper.The more difficult a TL item is, the more likely Chinese students are to commit errors when using it. To avoid language errors, Chinese students tend to avoid using prepositions. Avoidance of this kind means prepositions are underused. In other words, though prepositions occur in Chinese students' compositions, they appear less frequently when compared with prepositions used by English-speaking people in their written English. Fear of making errors is not the only source of avoidance of prepositions. Chinese-English (C-E) difference, Chinese learners' English competence, etc. all contribute to avoidance of prepositions.Since English prepositions are multi-functional, an avoided preposition can displays itself in many ways. The major concern of this thesis is to find, among various functions of an avoided preposition, which functions are more avoided or less avoided.Based on Chinese Learner English Corpus (CLEC), this study found all concordance lines containing of by using a concordance method called Key Words in Context (KWIC), sampled some of them and then made generalizations about how of was used in CLEC. 30 compositions were selected from CLEC. of used in every composition was counted and classified according to the above generalizations. A quantitative analysis of data was conducted in this study. The multiple regression analysis is most important.The study discovered that as far as of is concerned, the structural function of English prepositions is less avoided. Besides, it was found that of used to form N is least avoided while of employed in PV is most avoided. Such findings can be explained by the nature of preposition of, the spoken tendency of Chinese students' compositions andChinese students' ignorance of register restrictions, etc. These factors accounting for avoidance of English prepositions have not been mentioned in literature reviewed by this paper.Some teaching suggestions were provided in this paper: the structural function of preposition of should be emphasized by teachers in order that students could grasp the main usage of preposition of; It is desirable that teachers acquaint their students with English register knowledge and C-E differences. Limitations of the study and suggestions for further researches were presented in the ending part of this thesis.