An Error Analysis Of English Preposition Use In Senior High School Learners’ Writing

English prepositions are characterized by polysemy, multi-function and high frequency.The variety of prepositional uses and strong grammatical functions bring Chinese Englishlearners many difficulties in writing.This study is a corpus-based error analysis of the ten most frequently used Englishprepositions in Senior High School Learners corpus (SHSL), which is a subcorpus of ChineseLearner English Corpus (CLEC). The study tries to answer the following three researchquestions:1. What kind of errors do the senior high school learners usually make when usingprepositions?2. What are the differences of the misuses of different prepositions?3. What are the causes of those prepositional errors by senior high school learners?Based on Senior High School Learners corpus (SHSL), this study firstly finds the tenmost frequently used prepositions by using computer software tools. After that theconcordance lines of prepositional errors in SHSL are reviewed by using a concordancemethod of Key Words in Context (KWIC). Then the major errors of the ten most frequentlyused prepositions in SHSL are analyzed.The study shows that students make mainly five types of prepositional errors—errorsof prepositional pattern, errors of prepositional phrase, word substitution, word absence andword redundancy. The errors are not concentrated on one particular preposition. Thedistribution of prepositional errors of the ten prepositions is nearly equal. However, theprepositional errors mainly concentrate on one error type, namely unacceptable combinationwith nouns (npp1). It is also found that errors are caused by native language interference,intralingual interference and overgeneralization. For the purpose of improvement inpreposition teaching and learning, the application of corpus is therefore recommended inteaching prepositions.