A Corpus-based Study On The Use Of English Spatial Prepositions Of Chinese College Students

Spatial prepositions play a very important role in English language. They arecomparatively small in number, simple in form, but in high usage frequency and wide usagerange. They have always been the important point and difficult point in English teaching andlearning. Spatial prepositions are closely related to the cognition of spatial field. They aremore than one kind in our daily lives, and the usage frequencies are different which areinfluenced by many factors, such as cultural differences, geographical environments andcognitive approaches. The differences in English spatial prepositions use between nativespeakers and Chinese English learners, the features and problems of spatial prepositions usedby Chinese learners, all of them should be taken into account in SLA. Based on the relevantdata collected from Chinese English learner corpus and English native speakers corpus, theanalysis indicates the use of English spatial prepositions of Chinese college students whichaims to enrich the correlative studies and improve the English communication. The errorcategories and error causes are described in this thesis which is helpful to English teaching.This thesis is designed to answer the following questions:1. What are the differences ofsemantics and frequency of spatial prepositions IN, ON, AT used by Chinese college studentsand English native speakers?2. What are the features of major errors of English spatialprepositions committed by Chinese college students? And what are the causes?This thesis researches the use of spatial prepositions IN, ON, AT of Chinese collegestudents based on corpus and cognition frame. Based on the integration of qualitative andquantitative methodologies, the author collects the data from SWECCL and COCA, andmakes a comparative analysis. The research findings of this thesis are (1) Compared withEnglish native speakers, Chinese college students overuse the original meanings ofpreposition IN and ON, but underuse the original meanings of preposition AT;(2) Comparedwith English native speakers, Chinese college students overuse the prepositions’ simplemetaphor meanings and some fixed phrases, but the use lacks diversities;(3) Compared withEnglish native speakers, Chinese college students underuse the difficult extensive semanticmeanings of prepositions. Based on the integration of qualitative and quantitativemethodologies, the study classifies and analyzes the prepositional errors collected from CLEC.The research findings of this thesis are (1) The difficult points in English spatial prepositionslearning of Chinese college students at different levels are similar. Substitution is the mostcommon one of prepositional errors;(2) The error frequency is significantly correlated withlearners’ level, being decreased with higher proficiency level;(3) Most of the prepositional errors are caused by both intralingual transfer and interlingual transfer. The causes ofsubstitution, redundancy and structural errors are more inclined to intralingual transfer. Thecauses of omission are more inclined to interlingual transfer.Some pedagogical implications are given based on the findings which will furtherimprove the standardized teaching of spatial prepositions teaching and clarify the importantpoints and difficult points. Finally, the author points out the research limitations and makessuggestions on further researches.