Corpus-Based Study On English Directional Spatial Prepositions “along” And “through”- A Comparison Of The Uses Between British Native Speakers And Chinese EFL Learners

It is challenging for Chinese EFL(English as a Foreign Language)learners to select and use English spatial prepositions appropriately.Facing the issue of describing the spatial relationships between entities,Chinese EFL learners have trouble with those spatial prepositions which share an overlapping semantic field.Thus,exploring the reasons behind this phenomenon may contribute to better teaching and mastery of English spatial prepositions.Most of the previous studies in this field focus on relatively static prepositions,such as in and on;and the scope of most previous studies is also limited to the usage and collocation of a single preposition,lacking the contrast between prepositions which are similar in meaning.This study selects two English directional spatial prepositions along and through which share an overlapping semantic field to explore the differences in the use of the two English directional spatial prepositions between Chinese EFL learners and native speakers of English based on two corpora “Chinese Learner English Corpus”(CLEC)and “British National Corpus”(BNC)and to explore the reasons behind the differences by means of corpus linguistic study method.It aims to find out the discrepancy between the two groups concerning the use of the two English directional spatial prepositions.Through the contrastive analysis,it is found that there does exist a discrepancy in the use of English directional spatial prepositions along and through between Chinese EFL learners and native speakers of English: Chinese EFL learners tend to use more of the literal meanings whereas native speakers of English tend to use more of their extending meanings.In terms of English spatial prepositions with multiple meanings,native speakers of English tend to select proper English spatial prepositions based on different situations whereas Chinese EFL learners rarely select those meanings they are not familiar with native speakers of English use the fixed collocations of English spatial prepositions more frequently whereas Chinese EFL learners seldom use them,or if they do,they make mistakes in this aspect.In addition to spelling mistakes,the main problems for Chinese EFL learners in the use of English spatial prepositions are confusion about selecting appropriate English spatial prepositions which share an overlapping semantic field,and unfamiliarity with the use and collocations of English spatial prepositions with different meanings.Based on the findings of this present study,it is suggested that both teachers and Chinese EFL learners pay more attention to the extending meanings of English spatial prepositions,collocations of English spatial prepositions,and the distinction between English spatial prepositions which share an overlapping semantic field.