A Contrastive Corpus-based Study On Prepositional Use In Senior High School Students’ English Writings

As a part of speech with functional and structural features,preposition maintains high occurrence either in oral production or text writing,which undoubtedly has brought about various difficulties and challenges for Chinese English learners.However,judging by related English prepositional studies at home and abroad,most of them have focused on non-English major college students’ English writings,with few English beginners and intermediates involved.Furthermore,relevant studies mainly have concentrated on the analysis of spatial prepositions,especially a single spatial preposition,few of them looking at the systematical exploration of the discrepancy of prepositional distribution in use and errors.Therefore,with the aid of corpus software(BFSU Power Conc,Wordsmith,Log-likelihood Calculator),text analysis,and questionnaire,the present study attempts an exploration of senior high school students’ general distribution of prepositional use and characteristics of prepositional errors in English writings.Based on theories of contrastive analysis and error analysis,with 96 Grade One students from Liuzhou Senior High School as subjects,the present study established a self-compiled corpus and compared the writing samples with the referenced one—ST2 sub-corpus of Chinese Learner English Corpus(CLEC),aiming at elaborating the two research questions as follows:(1)What are the differences between both corpora in terms of the general picture of prepositional use,such as frequency,collocation and type token ratio? And(2)What is the discrepancy of prepositional errors between both corpora?The research results indicate that:(1)There to some degree exists an overlap concerning the utilization of high-frequent prepositions between the two corpora,which in some way reflects high school students’ common preference in the choice of prepositions.However,relatively speaking,the ST2 corpus takes on more diversity both in overusing and underusing prepositions,and the writings reveal that students are accustomed to overusing prepositions to,in,at,on and about while underusing of,with,from and by.In contrast,participants in this study tend to overuse to,for and about,and underuse of and by.Secondly,with regard to prepositional collocations,both corpora show several similarities and differences in the collocations of part of speech and semantic preference according to results of the analysis on the high-frequent prepositions to,in,of and for.Taking preposition to as an example,it is commonly collocated with the verb of original form or past form to construct an infinitive in the ST2 corpus,but it is mainly used with noun,personal pronoun,and adjectival possessive pronoun in the self-compiled corpus.It is also noted that except set phrases,the preposition in in ST2 is commonly used to denote location,state and time,while it is used to prescribe location and scope in the self-compiled corpus,with little relevance to other uses.Furthermore,the use of preposition of in both corpora bears some similarities,which is to express ownership or constitute noun phrases.However,it is also notable that according to statistical analysis,senior high school students seem to understand and apply such structure as “of+Noun”more efficiently compared to the structure “of+V-ing”.What is more,the preposition for is commonly combined with a personal pronoun to form such a fixed structure as “It is+adj.+for sb.+to do sth.”.Finally,the type token ratio comparison presents extensiveness and diversity in certain prepositional use,revealing the prepositional strength of collocation.The p value reveals that the research subjects are capable of applying to and of(0.000 “-***” and0.005 “-**” respectively)as well as their collocations more flexibly and widely in English writings.However,there is little difference of use in terms of in and for between both corpora.(2)With respect to error types,the most frequent prepositional errors in both corpora can be orderly ranked as pattern(pp1),absence(wd4),redundancy(wd5)and set phrase(pp2).However,the p value(0.000 “-***”)of error distribution has proved that there exists a significant difference in terms of their total frequency,and it seems that the subjects are more likely to commit prepositional errors than those from the ST2 corpus.Characteristics of each error type of English prepositions made by senior high school students are as follows.Pattern errors are derived from the overuse of to in verb and noun structures;Absence is originated from verbal fixed structures and phrases;Redundancy results from the failure to distinguish between transitive and intransitive verbs,as well as the confusion among predicate verbs,infinitives and modal verbs;Set phrase errors are attributed to nouns and verbs.Moreover,results of the questionnaire also indicate that the positive effects of the first language on English prepositional learning surpass negative ones,which to some degree reveals the fact that under most circumstances,senior high school students are subject to Chinese thinking modes to acquire English prepositions.In the hope of facilitating effective prepositional teaching and learning,some tentative tactics for English teachers and students are put forward subsequently,for example,teaching preposition both with core meaning and metaphorical meaning;adopting abundant teaching materials and visual approaches to cultivate prepositional thinking modes;tactfully employing computer software,corpus platforms and applications to teach prepositions.As for students,they are supposed to learn prepositions holistically and understand them within contexts,and shift the model of prepositional phrases learning from memorization to comprehension.