“Watch TV in home”: Identification and Analysis of Incorrect Uses of the Prepositions in, on and at in Turkish EFL Learners’ Written Productions

Details

Supervisors

Paquot, Magali

Faculty

Faculté de philosophie, arts et lettres

Degree label

Master [120] en langues et lettres modernes, orientation germaniques

Abstract

The present article examines the use of the three most frequent prepositions in English, i.e. in, on, at by Turkish EFL learners in their written productions. The study aims at first finding to which extent Turkish EFL learners produce errors in their use of the prepositions in, on, at then discussing the underlying reasons. The data used in the study were extracted from the International Corpus of Learner English (Granger et al., 2009) and consist of a total number of 969 occurrences of in, on, at. Each occurrence was automatically and manually annotated following the Louvain error-tagging taxonomy (Dagneaux, et al., 1998) and classified into categories, namely, ‘correct’ and ‘incorrect’ and then into error subcategories, namely, ‘misuse’ (instead of another preposition, e.g. watch T.V. in home*), ‘overuse’ (use of a preposition even though no preposition was required, e.g. money will talk in every where*), ‘omission’ (no use of the preposition even though it was required, e.g. decide euthanasia*) and ‘unsure’ (the researcher was not sure on the erroneous use, e.g. at last times). The occurrences belonging to the category of ‘unsure’ were then discussed with the two co-researchers, in order to determine the type of error. At the end of the analysis, the plausible reasons for producing errors in the use of the prepositions in, on, at were investigated. The findings indicate that the erroneous uses of the prepositions in, on, at by Turkish EFL learners were highly related to the postposition -de, thus, caused by the interference of native language but also to overgeneralisation of grammar rules and lack of knowledge in the use of these prepositions in specific contexts.