Preposition Error Analysis In Senior High School Students' English Writing

According to the National English Curriculum Standards for General High School in 2017,listening,speaking,reading,viewing and writing are the basic skills that high school students are required to master in the process of English learning.Among them,“writing”,the important form of language output,is the most difficult and the weakest skill for students to master,so English writing in senior high school cannot be ignored.At present,senior high school students' writing ability needs to be improved because errors in the compositions,including the preposition errors,are very prominent.Therefore,this research focuses on the preposition errors and causes of these preposition errors in senior high school students' compositions.Based on the theoretical foundations,namely contrast analysis,error analysis,interlanguage,image schema and conceptual metaphor,this research seeks to explore the preposition errors in monthly examination writings of 350 senior high school students from three grades in Jiangjin Middle School in Chongqing by using Sougou Input,Pigai Network and 1Checker and SPSS.16.0 as research instruments.At the same time,questionnaires and interviews for students and teachers are applied to analyze the preposition errors and causes of preposition errors.This research aims to answer the following questions: 1)What's the overall situation of preposition errors in senior high school students' English writings? What are the different dimensions of preposition errors? 2)What's the distribution difference of preposition errors in students' English compositions of different grades? 3)What are the causes of the preposition errors in senior high school students' writings?After analyzing the writing samples,questionnaires and interviews,the research results of this study are as following: 1)The preposition error rate in the compositions from three grades is high,accounting for 22.71%.The frequencies of preposition errors in the four categories are as following: prepositional collocation error > prepositionalabsence > preposition set phrase > prepositional redundancy.2)Preposition errors in students' English compositions show a decreasing trend from Grade 1 to Grade 3.In the dimensions of prepositional collocation and prepositional absence,there is a trend of declining with the increase in grade.In the dimensions of preposition set phrase and prepositional redundancy,there is a “down-up” tendency from Grade 1 to Grade 3.3)According to the results of the questionnaires and interviews,interlingual interference,intralingual interference and induced errors are the main causes that lead to those preposition errors.The induced errors include students' attitudes toward prepositions learning and preposition learning strategies,teachers' teaching methods of prepositions,such as the translation method and comparative practice method,and teachers' preposition correction ways.In the end,based on the research results,some feasible suggestions for English teaching,especially for preposition teaching are put forward,which aim to help students to reduce preposition errors and improve their writing ability in the future.