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Errors in the Usage of Prepositions in Advanced EFL Learners with Spanish as L1
Todorova, Mina ; Gráf, Tomáš (advisor) ; Luef, Eva Maria (referee)
The aim of this bachelor thesis is to carry out a contrastive interlanguage analysis of advanced learner English of speakers with Spanish as L1, more specifically of the errors these speakers commit when using the prepositions "in", "at" and "on". The data is drawn from the Spanish subcorpus of LINDSEI, which contains 50 interviews with higher intermediate to advanced speakers. The concordance AntConc was used to extract all instances of the aforementioned words and the results were exported into an Excel file in which the coding was subsequently carried out. Having determined which uses of the prepositions to include in our study and which of those were erroneous, we analyzed them and tried to determine to what extent they stemmed from L1 transfer. The criterion was the existence of a literal parallel structure in Spanish. In doing so, we obtained the following error rates: "in" - 11.1%, "at" - 8.5%, "on" - 41.2%, misuse being always considerably more prevalent than overuse. We furthermore confirmed that the three prepositions are often mixed up among themselves, largely due to the influence of the learners' mother tongue. That interference is strongest in the case of "on" and weakest in that of "at". We noticed several recurring errors committed by a variety of students. Although not particularly...
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