| The present study is a corpus-based Contrastive Interlanguage Analysis, in which the overall characteristics of the 15 most frequent English prepositions used by Chinese learners are investigated quantitatively, and 3 of them-of, at and over are qualitatively analyzed.The study reveals that there are no significant difference in the overall frequency of the prepositions between the data of CLEC and Brown. But Chinese learners tend to overuse some prepositions, such as to, in, about and underuse some others, like of, as, with, by. A diachronic study of the five sub-corpora of CLEC shows that the advanced learners is much closer to the natives than the beginners in using preposition usages, probably because they have received more training and have a better command of English. Nevertheless, some problems of the beginners can still be found among intermediate learners and advanced learners. For example, of is always underused by all of them.The investigation into the deviant use of prepositions indicates that L1 Interference is a major interlingual source. In addition, overgeneralization and the unawareness of collocational restrictions also lead to the deviant use. Strategically, to avoid committing errors, Chinese EFL learners tend to avoid using certain prepositions while excessively using some others, which results in Chinese learners' overuse and underuse. Furthermore, the teacher's instruction in class may also have affected the students' prepositional usages. Based on the above findings, we are able to offer the following pedagogical suggestions.1．The learner corpus can present the characteristics of the learners' interlanguage, which can be used to guide the process of language teaching.2．In order not to cause learners to draw the wrong conclusions, teachers should present authentic and correct sources of the target language in class.3．The natural and authentic preposition usages, based on corpus evidence, should be added to the systematic pedagogical sources. |
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