An Error Analysis Of Preposition Used In Junior High School Students’ English Writing

Writing plays an indispensable role in language skills.Because writing is a complex and creative task,it is difficult for students,especially junior high school students to master this skill.When learners learn a new language,it is inevitable that they will commit errors.Because positions of prepositions are flexible and changeable and they are very rich in meaning,students often make prepositional errors in their compositions.Therefore,this study concentrates on prepositional errors in junior high school students’ compositions.Based on the error analysis,this study seeks to explore the prepositional errors in examination writing of 160 junior high school students’ English writing in Grade Eight by using Excel and SPSS 17 as research instruments.At the same time,questionnaires and interviews for students and teachers are applied to analyze the prepositional errors and the causes of prepositional errors.Thus,the research questions are as follows:(1)What the types and proportion of prepositional errors appear in English compositions of junior high school students?(2)What are the causes of the prepositional errors in junior high school students’ English compositions?After analyzing the students’ writing texts,questionnaires and interviews,the research results of this study are as follows:Four types of prepositional errors were noted in students’ writing samples.They are set phrase errors,absence errors,redundancy errors and collocation errors.In terms of the proposition of each prepositional error,prepositional collocation errors are the major type of prepositional errors,taking up 40% of the total.Prepositional set phrase errors and prepositional redundancy rank second and third respectively,occupying 32.1% and 14.9% of the total prepositional errors respectively.The proportion of prepositional absence errors is the lowest which accounts for only 13% of the aggregate prepositional errors.The causes of prepositional errors are interlingual interference,intralingual interference,improper learning strategies,less attention to prepositional learning,lack of prepositional knowledge and improper teaching methods.In the end,based on the research results,some feasible suggestions for prepositional teaching and learning are presented for the purpose of helping students reduce errors when they use prepositions and improving their writing ability in the future.