| English prepositions are characterized by high-frequency and complex usages. They are difficult grammar points which constantly make non-English majors students confused. However, most researches done by domestic and foreign scholars focused on the study of the semantic and grammatical function of prepositions. Few researches have been done on prepositional errors made by non-English majors. Therefore, the present paper aims at finding out the main categories of the errors made by non-English majors when they use high-frequency prepositions, and what are the influential factors of the errors.Ten high-frequency prepositions were selected as samples of the research. And 180 sophomores at North China University of Science and Technology are chosen as subjects.Writing test, Fill-in-the-blank test and interview are the major instruments in the research.Through analyzing the result of the first two tests, it reveals that most students cannot use prepositions freely and correctly. And the errors are not centered on certain prepositions.The distribution of prepositional errors of the ten prepositions is nearly equal. The study shows that students make mainly four categories of prepositional errors, i.e errors of prepositional pattern, errors of prepositional phrase, word redundancy and word absence.The result of interview indicates that most English learners regard the interference of the mother language as the most influencing cause for prepositional errors, followed by the absence of the prepositions in mother language, confusion of the similar expressions and so on.Based on the findings, it is suggested that teachers have to make corrections according to the errors students make frequently and treat errors in a reasonable way. It is hoped that Error Analysis and corpus can help teachers find out what type of errors, how frequently and what causes there are that students make errors on a preposition, so as to solve the problems in a more effective way. |
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