A Corpus-based Contrastive Study On The Use Of English Prepositions Between Chinese English Learners And Native English Speakers

Prepositions only account for a small part of the vast English vocabulary.From the descriptions of Biber(1999:74),prepositions play an important role in sentences.Prepositions are a means of connecting noun phrases and other structures.Using prepositions correctly helps to improve the accuracy of writing,enhance the discoursal coherence of the article,and also help to improve the authenticity of writing.Therefore,it is very important for language learners to use prepositions properly.This paper will focus on the following questions: what are the similarities and differences in the distribution of the first 15 high-frequency prepositions between BNC and CLEC?What are their similarities and differences of common collocations of prepositions to,in,of and by?What are the common types of errors which Chinese English learners usually make and what are the possible causes of these errors? What are the implications for daily English teaching?Based on the British National Corpus(BNC)and the Chinese Learner English Corpus(CLEC),this paper adopts Corpus-driven Approach and Contrastive Interlanguage Analysis.This paper has analyzed the frequencies and differences of high-frequency preposition by using the corpus retrieval software Ant Conc3.5.8 and BNC online corpus retrieval tool.Then their collocations of these preposition has been analyzed in BNC and CLEC.After that,the misuse of these prepositions by Chinese EFL learners is further studied.The purpose of this paper is to compare the collocations of these prepositions in BNC with that in CLEC,so as to further explore the implications of the results for language vocabulary teaching.The results show that Chinese EFL learners and native English speakers use prepositions to,in,of and by differently.Firstly,after statistical analysis of the common15 high-frequency prepositions in English,it has found that Chinese EFL learners has underused most prepositions except to,in,about and over.Through chi square test,it has found that four words have significant differences.The four words(to,in,of and by)are selected for further study.Chinese English learners often overuse “to” and “in”.Chinese EFL learners often underused of and by.Secondly,Chinese EFL learners use quite differently from native English speakers in left collocations of the four prepositions,while they are closer to native English speakers in right collocations of the four prepositions.Thirdly,Chinese EFL learners tend to make mistakes of wd(word form)and pp(prepositional phrase)when they use the four prepositions.The learners at all stages have more or less misused prepositions.Through the analysis of the research results,the reasons for the improper use of prepositions are as follows:(1)the foreign language learning environment that emphasizes prepositional phrases and collocations,while ignores prepositional meanings;(2)students do not understand the rules of prepositions;(3)negative transfer of mother tongue,etc..Finally,it is proposed that corpus-based teaching method can be applied to teachers’ daily teaching.Collocation Theory and Error Analysis Theory can be applied to teachers’ daily teaching and students’ daily learning.Mastering the mistakes which students often make,teachers can design courses carefully for students to avoid students to misuse prepositions,which helps students improve self-learning ability.