An Investigation of Students’ Errors in the Use of the Nine Most Common English Prepositions

Abstract

The present study aims at investigating the student’s errors in the use of the most common English prepositions by second year license students at the English department, Mohammed Seddik Ben Yahia, Jijel University.The purpose of this study is to set out the main reasons that lead students to misuse those nine prepositions.It is hypothesized that second year students of English would show the same developmental errors in addition to errors which result from first language interference.To check the validity of this hypothesis, two means of research are used to collect data, a grammar test and an analysis of students’ composition. The test has been administered to 120 participants out of 270 students in order to identify the most problematic English prepositions they face in using these prepositions by clarifying their types of errors. The second instrument is a written composition from the first semester exams papers of the same groups in order to determine the misuse of the most common English prepositions. Later compare their performances on the grammar test and their own written expressions. The obtained results show that second year students make errors in the grammar test. Whereas, a few of them made few errors in written composition. So, they avoid using complex English prepositions.