The use of prepositions by Spanish learners of English at university level: A longitudinal analysis

Abstract

Prepositions are a fuzzy word class dueto their morphological, syntactic and semantic characteristics. They are difficult to use by foreign learners of English al all levels, as reported by various scholars using dijferent methodological approaches which are not always comparable. In order to find out which prepositions pose problems to Spanish university students, a four-year longitudinal learner corpus was analysed a posteriori following Granger's lntegrated Contrastive Model. Our findings show four patterns of development in the use of prepositions, and reveal the role of the mother tangue. These results lead to some suggestions to improve the design of EFL materials for Spanish university students.