Malay ESL students’ difficulties in using English prepositions
Özet
The study attempts to undertake an error analysis
of prepositions employed in the written work of Form 4 Malay
ESL (English as a Second Language) students in Malaysia. The
error analysis was undertaken using Richards’s (1974)
framework of intralingual and interlingual errors and
Bennett’s (1975) framework in identifying prepositional
concepts found in the sample. The study first identified common
prepositional errors in the written texts of 150 student
participants. It then measured the relative intensities of these
errors and found out possible causes for the occurrences of
these errors. In this study, one significant finding is that among
the nine concepts of prepositions examined, the participant
students tended to make the most number of errors in the use of
prepositions of time and place. The present study has
pedagogical implications in teaching English prepositions to
Malay ESL students
