A CORPUS BASED STUDY ON THE PREPOSITION ERROR TYPES IN TURKISH EFL LEARNERS ESSAYS

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to investigate the categories of preposition errors made by EFL learners of elementary and intermediate proficiency levels by comparing the rate of preposition errors (addition, omission, substitution) to their total preposition uses in their essays, and by comparing the overall preposition usage of learners of both proficiency levels. The study was conducted with 75 learners of elementary level (A2) and 75 learners of intermediate level at Erciyes University School of Foreign Languages. Initially, 550 elementary and 230 intermediate level essays were scanned, and 75 exam papers for each group were randomly chosen as the sample of the research. In the analysis, depending on Grammar of Spoken and Written English of Biber et al. (1999), total preposition numbers and erroneous preposition uses in each essay were counted and color coded by the researchers by blind-checking the papers separately to assure the reliability. Then, the erroneous prepositions were subcategorized as addition, omission and substitution according to Corder's (1973) Common Errors in English and Categorization of Error Types. The results of the independent-sample t-test indicated that; a) there was no difference between groups in terms of addition type error; b) learners of elementary level made statistically more omission type errors than learners of intermediate learners; c) learners of intermediate level made statistically more substitution type errors than learners of elementary level; d) percentages of preposition errors to total preposition usage in elementary level essays were statistically higher than those of intermediate level. In the light of the findings of this research, the importance of teaching preposition in chunks for elementary level, and providing learners of intermediate level with more detailed linguistic features of preposition were emphasized.