Investigating the Iranian University EFL Learners’ Sources ofMaking Errors with a Focus on the Prepositions At , On , and In

The present study attempts to investigate the errors made by Iranian EFL learners when using the prepositions during their composition writing and during their translation tasks. The contrastive analysis of this study is focused on three English prepositions: at, on, and in. These prepositions are used in many situations, but most of the time thelearners get confused. They don’t know the correct usage in a context. To meet the goals of the study, an error analysis was conducted to examine the status of errors of prepositions usage at , on , and in made due to the transitional constraints between Persian and English languages. To this end, two methods of data collection were used by the researchers. First, the researchers provided the topic for the writing session for 40 EFL students in Velayat University and then collected their compositions. Then, sentences with prepositional errors were isolated and the errors were categorized. Secondly, a translation task was developed by the researchers. The translation task was then given to the participants to translate the sentences from Persian into English during the allotted time. The results indicated that the errors committed by the students were due to both Inter-lingual and Intra-lingual interferences. It is hoped that this research will help teachers of English Language to be aware of these problems and re-evaluate their teaching approach.

Keywords:

contrastive analysis , error analysis , prepositions , at , on , in