An Analysis On The Prepositional Collocation Errors In Senior High School Students’ English Writing

The learning of English prepositions plays a very important role in English language learning.Some researchers,as Oller and Inal(1971)stated in their researches that learners’ proficiency in preposition can highly influence their overall proficiency in English.That means,whether English learners can use prepositions properly can be seen as an effective way to measure their proficiency in English.At the same time,collocation ability is an important criterion to measure learners’ English proficiency.Mastering collocation helps learners to produce authentic expressions,which is the premise of using a language freely.That is to say,whether English learners can correctly use prepositional collocations can be used as an effective way to test learners’ English proficiency.The importance of English prepositional collocation is also reflected in its high frequency of use.The common collocations of prepositions in English include: collocation of prepositions with nouns,collocation of verbs with prepositions,collocation of adjectives with prepositions.These collocations are frequently used in senior high school students’ writings.However,for most senior high school students,the mastery of English preposition collocation is a great challenge.Especially when students write compositions that require relatively high English proficiency,they make a lot of mistakes,which results in students losing interest in English learning,which makes students lose their interests in English learning.In this paper,300 compositions written by 150 students were chosen to investigate by the theory of error analysis.This study is to answer the following three questions.1.What is the status quo of prepositional collocation use in senior high school students’ writing?2.What are the errors of prepositional collocation in senior high school students’ English writing?3.What are the main causes of prepositional collocation errors in English writing?The subjects of this study come from Tongshan senior high school in Xuzhou City.According to the deep analysis and research of the prepositional collocation errors in students’ writings,the present situation of using prepositional collocation in senior high school students’ writing can be found out.At the same time,students’ errors were divided into four categories: the errors of omission,the errors of addition,the errors of selection and the errors of ordering.As far as the errors of selection,which accounts for the most part of all the prepositional collocation errors.Combining error analysis with the results of individual interviews with students,it was concluded that the main causes of prepositional collocation errors in senior high school students’ writings are the interference of mother tongue,overgeneralization and confusion with other prepositions.Finally,through the analysis of the research results,this paper puts forward some suggestions on the teaching of prepositional collocation in senior high school English.