Students’ Understanding of Semantic Complexity of English Spatial Prepositions in Reading Texts

Abstract

This study is an investigation of English foreign language students’ understanding of the semantic complexity of the English spatial prepositions’’ in, on, at, for, from, above, over, to, and across’’. It aimed at diagnosing the factors that account for the difficulty in comprehending and using these prepositions and checking whether reading facilitates the comprehension and use of these prepositions. Furthermore, it spotlighted the most problematic prepositions for the learners. Thus, it was hypothesized that second-year students of English at Mohammed Seddik Ben Yahia University Jijel will better understand the semantic meanings of English spatial prepositions while reading texts. To check the validity of this hypothesis, a grammar test was used to collect the data. It was distributed to 67 sophomores from the population of 272 second year LMD stydents . The collected data were analyzed qualitatively and quantitatively. The obtained results indicated that the participants show weak performances in deciphering the semantics of English prepositions in reading texts. This semantic complexity is caused by two major reasons which are the students’lack of knowledge and the polysemous nature of prepositions. Given the findings, it was recommended for teachers to provide learners with ample instructions about the different meanings of each preposition in different contexts. Learners, on their part, are required to make extra efforts and practice to master the meanings and appropriate usages of prepositions