Investigating common errors in the use of positions of english prepositions by non english major students at university of natural sciences

45 Figure 7: Students’ points of view towards using British National Corpus in learning English prepositions .... ABSTRACT This thesis aims at investigating the common errors in the u

VIET NAM NATIONAL UNIVERSITY – HCM CITY

UNIVERSITY OF SOCIAL SCIENCES AND HUMANITIES

 

MASTER THESIS

INVESTIGATING COMMON ERRORS

IN THE USE OF ENGLISH PREPOSITIONS

BY NON-ENGLISH MAJOR STUDENTS

AT UNIVERSITY OF NATURAL SCIENCES

A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of

Master of Arts (TESOL)

Supervisor: ĐINH ĐIỀN, Assoc Prof - Ph D

Candidate: ÂU MINH TRIẾT – TESOL 2005

2010

-CERTIFICATE OF ORIGINALITY

I hereby certify my authorship of the thesis submitted today entitled:

INVESTIGATING COMMON ERRORS

IN THE USE OF ENGLISH PREPOSITIONS

BY NON-ENGLISH MAJOR STUDENTS

AT UNIVERSITY OF NATURAL SCIENCES

In terms of the Statement of Requirements for Theses in Master’s Programs Issued by the Higher Degree Committee

Ho Chi Minh City, March 2010

AÂU MINH TRIEÁT

RETENTION AND USE OF THE THESIS

I, hereby state that I, AÂu Minh Triết, being the candidate for the degree of

Master of TESOL, accept the requirements of the University relating to the retention and use of Master’s Thesis deposited in the library

In terms of these conditions, I agree that the original of my thesis deposited in the library should be accessible for the purposes of study and research, in accordance with the normal conditions established by the library for the care, loan or reproduction of the thesis

Ho Chi Minh City, March 2010

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to express my deepest gratitude to my thesis supervisor,

Associate Professor, Doctor Ñinh Ñiền, for his explicit guidance and valuable

support to the completion of my thesis Without his whole-hearted guidance, I could not have finished the thesis

I am also grateful to all my teachers, especially Doctor Nguyễn Kiều Thu and Doctor Nguyễn Hoàng Tuấn, for valuable and helpful instructions during the

three-year TESOL course (2005-2008)

I should also like to express my special thanks to the library staff of the University of Social Sciences and Humanities who help me with my search for reference materials

I also would like to sincerely thank Mr Phan Văn Báo, the Headmaster of

Ha Tien High School I have been offered wonderful conditions to fulfill my learning from him, without his support, I would be unable to fulfill my learning

In addition, I am indebted to all my colleagues and classmates, especially

Mr Võ Duy Minh, the class monitor, who give me valuable advice and assistance

in developing the study

Thanks also to my students for their cooperation in giving truly response to the questionnaire

Finally, my special thanks to my family for their unfailing support

TABLE OF CONTENTS

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Page

Certificate of originality i

Retention and use of the thesis ii

Acknowledgements iii

Table of contents iv

List of figures ix

List of tables x

List of abbreviations xi

Abstract xii

CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION 1

1.1 BACKGROUND TO THE STUDY 2

1.2 STATEMENT OF THE PURPOSE 4

1.3 RESEARCH QUESTIONS 6

1.4 SIGNIFICANCE OF THE STUDY 7

1.5 SCOPE OF THE STUDY 8

1.6 LIMITATIONS OF THE STUDY 9

1.7 STRUCTURE OF THE THESIS 10

CHAPTER 2: LITERATURE REVIEW 11

2.1 ERRORS VERSUS MISTAKES IN LEARNING SECOND LANGUAGE 11 2.2 ENGLISH PREPOSITIONS 12

2.2.1 CLASSES OF ENGLISH PREPOSITIONS 13

2.2.1.1 SPATIAL PREPOSITIONS 13

2.2.1.2 TEMPORAL PREPOSITIONS 14

2.2.1.3 LOGICAL PREPOSITIONS 15

2.2.2 ERRORS IN THE USE OF ENLISH PREPOSITIONS 15

2.3 CORPUS LINGUISTICS 18

2.3.1 BROWN CORPUS 21

2.3.2 PAUL NATION’S 1000 MOST FREQUENT WORD FAMILIES 22

2.4 BRITISH NATIONAL CORPUS 23

2.4.1 AN OVERVIEW OF BRITISH NATIONAL CORPUS 23

2.4.2 HOW TO USE BRITISH NATIONAL CORPUS 24

2.5 SUMMARY 27

CHAPTER 3: RESEARCH METHODOLOGY 28

3.1 RESEARCH DESIGN 28

3.2 SUBJECTS 29

3.3 RESEARCH PROCEDURES 29

3.4 INSTRUMENTS AND MATERIALS 31

3.4.1 INSTRUMENTS 31

3.4.1.1 QUESTIONNAIRE 32

3.4.1.2 TEST GENERATOR SOFTWARE OF EXAMVIEW 6.2 33

3.4.1.3 SOFTWARE OF CONCORDANCE VERSION 3.2 33

3.4.1.4 MICROSOFT OFFICE EXCEL 34

3.4.1.5 PERCENTAGE 35

3.4.2 MATERIALS 35

3.4.2.1 QUESTIONS ON PREPOSITIONS 36

3.4.2.1.1 FOR THE TESTS 36

3.4.2.1.1.1 CONSTRUCTING THE TEST QUESTIONS 36

3.4.2.1.1.2 CONSTRUCTING THE DIFFICULTY LEVEL TO THE WORDS USED IN THE QUESTIONS 38

3.4.2.1.1.3 ADMINISTERING THE TEST 39

3.4.2.1.2 FOR THE FINAL EXAM 40

3.4.2.2 COURSE BOOK 40

3.5 SUMMARY 40

CHAPTER 4 : FINDINGS AND DISCUSSION 41

4.1 DATA ANALYSIS 41

4.1.1 DETAILED ANALYSIS OF THE QUESTIONNAIRE 41

4.1.1.1 STUDENTS’ PERSONAL INFORMATION 42

4.1.1.1.1 STUDENTS’ GENDERS 42

4.1.1.1.2 STUDENTS’ PRIVATE TUTORS 43

4.1.1.1.3 STUDENTS’ SELF-ASSESSMENT 44

4.1.1.2 STUDENTS’ POINTS OF VIEW 45

4.1.1.2.1 QUESTION 1 45

4.1.1.2.2 QUESTION 2 46

4.1.1.2.3 QUESTION 3 47

4.1.1.2.4 QUESTION 4 48

4.1.1.2.5 QUESTION 5 49

4.1.1.2.6 QUESTION 6 50

4.1.2 DETAILED ANALYSIS OF THE TESTS AND EXAM PAPERS 50

4.1.2.1 RESULTS BASED ON THE PREPOSITIONS 51

4.1.2.1.1 PREPOSITION AT 51

4.1.2.1.2 PREPOSITION BEHIND 51

4.1.2.1.3 PREPOSITION BY 52

4.1.2.1.4 PREPOSITION FOR 53

4.1.2.1.5 PREPOSITION IN 53

4.1.2.1.6 PREPOSITION INTO 54

4.1.2.1.7 PREPOSITION ON 55

4.1.2.1.8 PREPOSITION OVER 55

4.1.2.1.9 PREPOSITION THROUGH 56

4.1.2.1.10 PREPOSITION TO 57

4.1.2.2 RESULTS BASED ON THE SPATIAL, TEMPORAL AND LOGICAL MEANINGS 57

4.2 FINDINGS 59

4.2.1 WITH THE QUESTIONS ABOUT PERSONAL INFORMATION 59

4.2.2 WITH THE QUESTIONS ABOUT STUDENTS’ ATTITUDES 59

4.2.2.1 STUDENTS’ POINTS OF VIEW TOWARDS THE USE OF BNC 60

4.2.2.2 STUDENTS’ POINTS OF VIEW TOWARDS THE USE OF

ENGLISH PREPOSITIONS 60

4.2.3 WITH THE PREPOSITIONS 61

4.2.4 WITH SPATIAL, TEMPORAL AND LOGICAL MEANINGS OF THE PREPOSITIONS 64

4.3 DISCUSSION 64

4.3.1 RELIABILITY OF THE DIFFICULTY LEVEL OF WORDS USED IN THE QUESTIONS FOR TESTS 64

4.3.2 RESPONSE TO THE RESEARCH QUESTIONS 68

4.4 SUMMARY 72

CHAPTER 5: CONCLUSION, IMPLICATIONS & RECOMMENDATIONS 73 5.1 IMPLICATIONS 73

5.2 RECOMMENDATIONS 74

5.3 CONCLUSION 75

BIBLIOGRAPHY 77

ONLINE BIBLIOGRAPHY 81

APPENDIX A 83

APPENDIX B 88

APPENDIX C 92

LIST OF FIGURES

Figure 1: The interface of British National Corpus 25

Figure 2: The results of searching for the phrase “on the river” ……… 26

Figure 3: The results of searching for the phrase “under the river” 26

Figure 4: The number of students in the distributions of genders 42

Figure 5: The distribution of the students’ periods in learning English 43

Figure 6: Students’ self-assessment for their English level 45

Figure 7: Students’ points of view towards using British National Corpus in learning English prepositions 46

Figure 8: Students’ behavior for reading British National Corpus’ examples 48

Figure 9: Students’ attitudes towards the roles of prepositions in contexts 48

Figure 10: Difficulties causing students to use prepositions incorrectly 49

Figure 11: Improvement after using British National Corpus 50 Figure 12: The common aspect in making errors for prepositions tests of students in

the research in the academic year of 2007-2008 and 2008-2009 71

LIST OF TABLES

Table 1: Results from the preposition questions with preposition “at” 51

Table 2: Results from the preposition questions with preposition “behind” 52

Table 3: Results from the preposition questions with preposition “by” 52

Table 4: Results from the preposition questions with preposition “for” 53

Table 5: Results from the preposition questions with preposition “in” 54

Table 6: Results from the preposition questions with preposition “into” 54

Table 7: Results from the preposition questions with preposition “on” 55

Table 8: Results from the preposition questions with preposition “over” 56

Table 9: Results from the preposition questions with preposition “through” 56

Table 10: Results from the preposition questions with preposition “to” 57

Table 11: Results in three tests of the two academic years in percentage in terms of spatial, temporal and logical meanings 58

Table 12: Correct answers and errors that students in the research made in the tests and exam in percent 61

Table 13: Correct answers and errors that students in the research made in the six tests in percent in the academic year of 2007-2008 and 2008-2009 63 Table 14: Comparison for the difficulty level of words among spatial meanings, temporal meanings and logical meanings of the prepositions 65

Table 15: The order of errors made with the ten prepositions in question 69

Table 16: Comparison for the order in Brown Corpus and error percents 69

LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS

1st group : First group

2nd group : Second group BNC : British National Corpus UNS : University of Natural Sciences

ABSTRACT

This thesis aims at investigating the common errors in the use of the ten most frequent English prepositions by non-majored English students at the University of Natural Sciences (UNS) The ten most frequent English prepositions

studied by the research were at, behind, by, for, in, into, on, over, through and to

To get this purpose, the research was carried out by means of a questionnaire, three tests on prepositions, and an exam paper in English The research was done with 104 non-majored English students at the UNS in their first terms of the two academic years of 2007-2008, including 55 students called first group (1st group) and 2008-2009, including 49 students called second group (2ndgroup) The students in the research were not taught the rule guiding the use of English prepositions They were instructed to use British National Corpus (BNC) to learn how to use English prepositions instead

Their responses to the questionnaire were used to analyze their attitudes towards English prepositions and BNC; whereas their results of the three tests and exam paper were used to consider their common errors in the use of English prepositions in term of the preposition itself and in terms of the spatial, temporal and logical meanings of prepositions

The findings proved that in terms of prepositions themselves, the students at

the UNS made most errors with the proposition behind and least with the preposition into Between these two prepositions were in turn downward through,

by, over, in, to, on, for, and at In terms of the spatial, temporal and logical

meanings of prepositions, the results also showed that the logical meaning of each preposition in the research caused them the most errors and the temporal meaning had the least ones Based on these findings, some recommendations were made to improve the further study

Implications from the research results focused on suggesting some pedagogical issues of teaching English prepositions:

 Among the three aspects of the prepositions’ meanings - spatial, temporal, and logical - the logical meaning of the preposition should be paid more attention to

 Corpora should be applied to teaching English as a second or a

foreign language

CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION

Prepositions according to Lawal (2004, in Onike, 2007, Introduction section:

¶1) indicate various relationships between words or phrases in sentences The relationship includes those of time, points, position, direction and various degrees of mental or emotional attitudes Prepositions like other parts of speech are frequently misused by the learners of the English language, especially under the second language learning situation This misuse is referred to as an error

In addition, Onike (2007, Introduction section: ¶2) found that one major error observed in the students writing and everyday speech is the prepositional error Many students used the prepositions carelessly as if they are not rule-governed This happens because the rule guiding the use of prepositions is somehow flexible Adewuyi (2001,

in Onike, 2007, Introduction section: ¶3) also contributes that the misuse of prepositions is mainly caused by linguistic interference factors, inappropriate learning and wrong application of rules

This study aims firstly to identify the common errors in the use of the ten

English prepositions of at, behind, by, for, in, into, on, over, through, and to, and

secondly to find out which meanings of the ten mentioned prepositions causing problems to students at the UNS It suggests an effective way of helping students to improve themselves in the use of the ten English prepositions in question, particularly, and of English prepositions, generally

This chapter presents (1) background to the study, (2) statement of the purpose, (3) research questions, (4) significance of the study, (5) scope of the study, (6) limitations of the study, and (7) structure of the thesis

1.1 BACKGROUND TO THE STUDY

Prepositions are often among the most frequent words in a language Based on the British National Corpus (Burnard, 2000), four out of the top-ten most-frequent

words in English are the four prepositions: of, to, in, and for (Baldwin, Kordoni & Villavicencio, 2009, Introduction section, ¶3) For all second language learners, the

English prepositions always cause problems Brala (2002: 1) found the following:

Most, if not all, (E)FL teachers and students are painfully aware of the fact that when it comes to mastering a foreign language one of the most troublesome areas to learn is the (idiomatic) usage of prepositions

And in his study, Onike (2007: Chapter three section, ¶2) showed that “The study by Azeez (2005) reveals that the misuse of prepositions is one of the observable errors in the students’ use of English in the school” In addition, after many years of teaching English at McGill University for students from all over the world, Prieur and Speyer (1988: 77) confessed that:

In my work with students from many parts of the world at the Center for the Development of Writing, at the Faculty of Education, McGill University, I had difficulty explaining why one preposition was used and not another – the reason being that there is rarely a “why”

In fact, many Vietnamese learners thought that using English prepositions appropriately is utopian For the majority of students, learning English prepositions is both very difficult and time-consuming Regardless of mountains of books, enormousness of preposition tests and lessons, English prepositions are still the challenges for Vietnamese students; and regardless of the similarity between Vietnamese and English in the pre-position structure – that is the noun will follow

almost directly the preposition, such as “on the river” can be translated word for word into Vietnamese as “treân soâng”, Vietnamese students, especially who are non-

majored English, still discover that English prepositions are troublesome

The problems can be seen as:

 The preposition itself is rather meaningless and hard to be defined Kreidler (1966: 121) pointed out, “Meaning is not a reliable guide to the choice of prepositions” It should be noted that speakers, even native

speakers, when uttering a preposition they usually use their hands to support the idea and to show how something is situated in relationship to something else In addition, Pittman (1966: 15) stated that “Prepositions have earned a reputation for difficulty if not a downright unpredictability” Furthermore, Turewicz (2005: 1) stated that:

Among reasons responsible for this state of affairs I would enumerate the fact that, as the findings about prepositions published within the Collins COBUILD series (1991-1997) show,

ten prepositions: at, by, for, from, in+into, of, on, to and with

realize more than two hundred meanings

And Swan (1997:436) affirmed that the preposition at can be

listed with eighteen main uses

 Prepositions almost come out at the weak forms, and are unstressed words in the utterances A listener, either a second language user or a native speaker, almost pays attention to the key words in the utterances - those are verbs, nouns or pronouns, but ignores the prepositions Even when the listener cannot hear the prepositions in the utterances he or she can guess them out Otherwise, the listener will easily fail to do with verbs, nouns or adjectives Cienki (1984:4) noted that “People seem

never to have taken prepositions seriously”

 The differences in the way of perceiving the world between Vietnamese and Western people also makes problems to Vietnamese students in the use of English prepositions According to Lý Toàn Thắng (2005), Vietnamese people consider words from the position of the observer whereas English people consider words under the position of the object For example, while Westerners say “The boat is on the river”, hardly do

Vietnamese people say “Thuyền chạy trên sông” even though the boat is really on the river They say “Thuyền chạy dưới sông”

instead, because the boat, from the position of the observer – that is on a

bank is actually in a lower position

In fact, the difference between English and good English is usually the right prepositions And Zughoul (1979:24) stated that “Prepositions are an everlasting

problem for foreign learners of English” Therefore, the research was carried out to

help students partly solve the problems on the use of English prepositions

1.2 STATEMENT OF THE PURPOSE

English prepositions are generally considered difficult to teach to non-native speakers because of a variety of reasons

Firstly, a large number of possible meanings for many prepositions change due

to the context in which they are used

Secondly, there is interference from the commonly-used grammar-translation method of instruction and native language for native Vietnamese learners This teaching method have formed in students – especially English non-major ones – the habit of using English by translating rather than by imitating native speakers’ ways of using English In term of using English prepositions, this teaching method makes students translate the Vietnamese prepositions in the sentence into the relevant English prepositions This results in the students' loss of fluency as they are usually trying to analyze rules and grammar before actually saying anything, in order to avoid being

"punished" for being wrong

According to Zughoul (1979, abstract section:¶1), there are some potentially more effective approaches to teaching prepositions, including Kreidler's association approach, Hornby's unit method, Langendoen's role-subdivisions, Close's relationships approach, Pittman's demonstrable uses, and Lindstromberg’s system of icons In most

of the above approaches, there has been a stress on teaching isolated structures, even situationalized, and little emphasis on real communication The common for these teaching methods is to base on students’ consciousness That is to say, students have to

think about the case that the prepositions should be used first, and then they make the sentences

The results have some limits Zughoul pointed out that if communication is a primary goal of English teaching and learners come to English prepositions as the users other than the “would be linguists”, they should acquire the English prepositions sub-consciously rather than learn those consciously with rules follow rules, exceptions follow exceptions (Zughoul, 1979, abstract section:¶1)

In years of teaching students how to use English prepositions at the UNS, the author of the thesis found that the traditional way had some limits Students often complained that they were unable to remember all rules and exceptions of the use of English prepositions It also took them a great deal of time to finish their exam papers Additionally, the results that the thesis author got from students were not satisfactory Averagely, only 30% of the preposition questions were responded correctly

Upon on the writer’s observations, errors in the use of English prepositions that non-majored English learners at the UNS have often made can be seen as resulting in:

 Prepositions are almost meaningless and undefined;

 Prepositions are not the key words and unclear in utterances;

 And the way of perceiving the relationship between the prepositions and the followed nouns of Vietnamese people differs from that of English people

To sum up, this study aims to find out the students’ common errors in the use of English prepositions in terms of the preposition itself and in terms of the spatial meaning, temporal meaning and logical meaning of the prepositions The research also investigated the effectiveness of using BNC to learn English prepositions on students

at the UNS

1.3 RESEARCH QUESTIONS

The research aims to answer the following three research questions:

1 What are common errors made by the student subjects in dealing with English prepositions?

2 What are common errors made by the student subjects in dealing with the spatial, temporal and logical meanings of the ten English prepositions in question?

3 How do the student subjects improve their use of the ten English prepositions in question after applying British National Corpus?

1.4 SIGNIFICANCE OF THE STUDY

On the one hand, mastering English prepositions is very important As

mentioned previously, the difference between English and good English is usually the

right prepositions However, Lindstromberg (2001 in Baldwin, Kordoni &

Villavicencio, 2009: Introduction section, ¶4) estimates that only less than 10% of upper-level English as a Second Language (ESL) students can use and understand prepositions correctly Other researchers have also come up with a similar conclusion which will be discussed in details in the next chapter On the other hand, a considerable number of students would like to master a foreign language and see independent learning as a goal Their success, however, seems quite limited because they lack basic knowledge on the langue and an effective study method

The author of the thesis has a strong belief that applying BNC to learning English prepositions helps students be able to use prepositions more effectively

This study is, therefore, carried out in the hope of helping students at the UNS find out their common errors in the use of English prepositions as well as supply them

a new effective study method Findings from this study will be the base for suggestions

to innovate the situation

1.5 SCOPE OF THE STUDY

The study was done with non-majored English students at the UNS The English level of those students was not much fluent Some of them even found it difficult to express simple ideas in daily conversations Thus, the study was delimitated with this English level

Among over 50 English prepositions, the study has been delimitated with only

10 common prepositions They are at, behind, by, for, in, into, on, over, through and

to Those prepositions were taken into the study because they were used very

frequently in English According to Brown Corpus 5000 most frequent words, those prepositions take the order of being used frequently as follows:

No Preposition Order in list of 5000 MFW

of Brown Corpus

Frequency of being used in %

Other prepositions also being used frequently, such as of, with, from, about,

like, since, against, without, until, etc have not been taken into the study because these

prepositions do not cover all three aspects of spatial, temporal and logical meanings

The following table displays different prepositions which have the order in the

list of 5000 MFW of Brown Corpus over the preposition of behind (at the place of 362

on the order list) but were not taken into the study

No Preposition Order in list of 5000 MFW of

1.6 LIMITATIONS OF THE STUDY

There are some limitations in the study:

Firstly, this study confines itself to investigating a considerable number of students at the UNS and giving recommendations are to the students majoring in Information Technology at this academic setting The result of the thesis may not be properly applied to the students of other majors at the UNS as well as the students of other universities

Secondly, this is due to the fact that corpus is a multifactor concept; the author

of the thesis cannot help resorting from various sources to have a sufficient literature review

In spite of the above-mentioned limitations of the thesis, its author hopes that this study does make a small contribution to the innovation of students’ situation at the UNS

1.7 STRUCTURE OF THE THESIS

The thesis is presented in five chapters

Chapter 1 provides (1) the background to the study, (2) the statement of the

purpose, (3) the three research questions, (4) the significance of the study, (5) the

scope of the study, (6) limitations of the study, and (7) the structure of the thesis

Chapter 2 reviews the relevant literature and research to the study consisting of

(1) the classes of English prepositions and the errors in the use of them, (2) the

introduction to Corpus Linguistics, including Brown Corpus and Paul Nation’s 100

most frequent word families, and (3) the overview of British National Corpus as well

as how to use it

Chapter 3 presents the methodology employed in the research done at the

UNS The data collected for the research are from a set of questionnaire, three tests on prepositions as well as an exam paper

Chapter 4 discusses the findings of this M.A thesis and analyzes questionnaire

responses as well as the percentage of tests and exam paper in the light of the research literature review

Chapter 5 summarizes the findings of the study and raises a number of

suggestions in the hope of contributing something to the improvement of students’ situation

CHAPTER 2 LITERATURE REVIEW

This chapter presents relevant theories and studies essential for the issues

discussed in the thesis The chapter consists of 5 sections: (1) errors versus mistakes in learning second language, (2) English prepositions, (3) Corpus Linguistics, (4) British National Corpus, and (5) summary

2.1 ERRORS VERSUS MISTAKES IN LEARNING SECOND LANGUAGE

In order to distinguish errors and mistakes in learning second language, Corder (1967, 1971) and James (1998) used the aspect of self-correctability to make the distinction According to these authors, a mistake can be more or less self-corrected while an error cannot be recognizable by learners Brown (1980:165; 1994:205) also came to the same conclusion, stating that “a performance error that is either a random guess or a slip in that it is a failure to utilize a known system correctly” whereas “an error is a noticeable deviation from the adult grammar of a native speaker, reflecting the inter-language competence of a learner.” Similarly, Richards et al (1992:127) defined that errors result from incomplete knowledge and mistakes are caused by lack

of attention, fatigue, carelessness or some aspects of performance In short, "mistakes are akin to slips of the tongue That is, they are generally one-time-only events The speaker who makes a mistake is able to recognize it as a mistake and correct it if necessary An error, on the other hand, is systematic That is, it is likely to occur repeatedly and is not recognized by the learner as an error" (Susan M and Larry Selinker; 2001:67)

Errors then relate to the use of linguistic items as words, grammatical items in a way which a fluent or native speaker of the language regards as showing faulty or incomplete language Lennon (1991) considered an error “is a linguistic form or combination of forms which in the same context and under similar conditions of

production would, in all likelihood, not be produced by the speakers' native speaker counterparts.” According to the Contrastive Analysis Hypothesis, errors occur as a result of interference when the learners transfer native language habits into the L2 It was also believed that interference takes place whenever there is a difference between native mother tongue and the target language The hypothesis based on Lado's suggestion in linguistic across cultures where he states "in the comparison between native and foreign language lies the key to ease all difficulties in foreign language learning" (Lado, 1957)

In this study, students learned using English prepositions without learning the rules of using English prepositions These students, then, use the ten English prepositions in questions in such a way that they transfer native language habits into English The word “errors” in this study is used under this aspect

2.2 ENGLISH PREPOSITIONS

Prepositions are a class of words that indicate relationships between nouns, pronouns and other words in a sentence They often come before a noun They never change their forms, regardless of the cases, genders, etc of the words they are referring

to According to Lawal (2004, in Onike, 2007: Introduction section, ¶1), prepositions indicate various relationships between words or phrases in sentences The relationship includes those of time, points, position, direction and various degrees of mental or emotional attitudes In addition, Agoi (2003, in Onike, 2007: Introduction section, ¶1) also described the preposition as a word or group of words used with a noun or noun equivalents to show the link between that noun which it governs and another word.Throughout the history of the English language, some new prepositions have come into use while others have fallen out of use as well as the meaning of some existing prepositions have been changed However, among those prepositions, there are only around fifty prepositions used commonly

2.2.1 CLASSES OF ENGLISH PREPOSITIONS

A preposition usually indicates the temporal, spatial or logical relationship of its object to the rest of the sentence It is this indication that classifies the classes of the prepositions Jackson (1982: 65) defined temporal prepositions are the prepositions

that show the relationship of time (e.g after the meal), spatial prepositions are the prepositions that show the relationship of place (e.g in front of the bus) and logic ones are the prepositions that show the logical relationship (e.g because of his action)

2.2.1.1 SPATIAL PREPOSITIONS

Spatial prepositions are the prepositions used to refer to the case that a

preposition has the meaning of describing the position of an object in relation to another object Here are some examples:

 You can sit before the desk (or in front of the desk)

 The professor can sit on the desk (when he's being informal) or behind the desk, and then his feet are under the desk or beneath the desk

 He can stand beside the desk (meaning next to the desk), before the desk,

between the desk and you, or even on the desk (if he's really strange), passing

his hands over the desk or resting his elbows upon the desk

 You can walk toward the desk, to the desk, around the desk, by the desk, and even past the desk while he sits at the desk or leans against the desk

As human beings communicate with each other about space, spatial reasoning is

a skill central to human tasks One way we share spatial information is through the use

of prepositions to describe relationships between entities in the world These utterances involve at minimum two objects: a reference object (the ground) and a located object (the figure) as well as the preposition that describes their relationships Studies have also shown that children learn how to use spatial language through interactions with objects in the world and without negative evidence Thus, the way that people

understand the use of a preposition to show a relationship between entities in the world depends much on the culture of their mother tongue

In English, the set of spatial prepositions is quite small when compared with other word categories (Lockwood, Forbus, Halstead and Usher, 2009:1)

2.2.1.2 TEMPORAL PREPOSITIONS

Temporal prepositions are the prepositions used to refer to the case that a

preposition has the meaning of describing the position of an event of time The following sentences are examples of temporal prepositions:

 They thought they could do this first third this year, during the summer, over

the summer months, if there was general agreement for the scheme

 We went there morning and evening every day, and on Sundays we were there

for the lengthy session of Sung Eucharist

 She's still not sleeping at nights

Generally speaking, a preposition is used with its temporal meaning when it is followed directly by a phrase mentioning the time

2.2.1.3 LOGICAL PREPOSITIONS

The term logical preposition is used to refer to the case that a preposition is

used not to describe either the position of an event of time or the position of an object

in relation to another object Here are some examples:

 My younger sister is very good at English

 Everybody was surprised at her sudden decision

 He asked me for 200,000 VND

 There is a table in the Japanese style

Thus, a preposition is used with its logical meanings when the word or the phrase which directly follows it has neither the temporal nor spatial meanings

2.2.2 ERRORS IN THE USE OF ENGLISH PREPOSITIONS

It is undeniable that one of the difficult problems for learners of English is the proper use of prepositions According to Opara (2001, in Onike: Introduction section,

¶1), prepositions like other parts of speech are frequently misused This misuse is referred to as error It is an instance of deviation from the norm of correct usage Preposition errors account for a significant proportion of all ESL grammar errors The study by Azeez (2005, in Onike: Chapter three section, ¶2) reveals that the misuse of prepositions is one of the observable errors in the students’ use of English in the school Adewuyi (2004, in Onike: Introduction section, ¶3) also contributes that preposition misuses are mainly caused by linguistic interference factors, inappropriate learning and wrong application of rules The correct preposition often cannot be guessed, and one has to learn the expression as a whole (Swan, 1997: 436) Lindstromberg (2001: 161) estimates that only less than 10% of upper-level English as

a Second Language (ESL) students can use and understand prepositions correctly In the study of the errors that Japanese students make with English prepositions, Izume et

al (2003, in Timothy, Kordoni & Villavicencio (2009): Introduction section, ¶3)comes to the same rate when reporting that error rates of the English preposition usage

by Japanese speakers are up to 10% The number, however, is still the largest category

of all the errors (Bitchener et al., 2005 in Chodorow, Tetreault, & Han (2007): Introduction section, ¶2) Felice et al (2008) create a small error-tagged corpus to determine errors in L2 English and find that 12% of errors were prepositions (Felice et

al (2008) in Ototake (2009): Introduction section, ¶1) Bitchener (2005, in Chodorow, Tetreault, & Han (2007): Introduction section, ¶2) also gives a more pessimistic number with 29% of all the errors when studying with 53 intermediate to advanced ESL students Dalgish (1985 in Chodorow, Tetreault, & Han (2007): Introduction section, ¶2) analyzes the essays of 350 ESL college students representing 15 different native languages and reported that preposition errors were present in 18% of sentences

in a sample of text produced by writers from first languages as diverse as Korean, Greek, and Spanish

For Vietnamese students, with a population of 100 randomly selected third-year students from five different classes of the in-service training section of the University

of Social Sciences and Humanities, Döông Thò Kim Höông (2006: 172 - 9) found the errors made by those students as follows:

N o Preposition Right

percentage

Error percentage

Among 10 prepositions that Döông Thò Kim Höông applied to her thesis, the

two prepositions from and with were out of my study Instead, two other prepositions

behind and through were taken into the study

According to Döông Thò Kim Höông’s findings, the preposition from

accounted for the most common errors (only 32.00% of the answers were correct with

this preposition) The preposition over introduced the opposite aspect with 80.00% of

the correct answers Totally, 48.64% of the answers were incorrect with the above 10 prepositions It is compatible with the results that the author of the thesis got with students at the UNS

2.3 CORPUS LINGUISTICS

Chomsky (1957, 1965, in Tony McEnery & Andrew Wilson, 1996:4), in a series of influential publications, changed direction of linguistics away from empiricism and towards rationalism in a remarkably short period of time That is to say, Chomsky turned successfully contemporary linguists from paying attentions to the observation of naturally occurring data, typically through the medium of the corpus, to language theories which are based on the development of a theory of mind in the case

of linguistics and have as a fundamental goal cognitive plausibility According to McEnery and Wilson (1996, in Tony McEnery & Andrew Wilson, 1996:5), the linguist even suggested that the corpus could never be a useful tool for the linguist, as the linguist must seek to model language competence rather than performance However, Chomsky’s theories and what he said happened in an age that linguists made their corpora with pens and papers For those, sentences in a language were something like grass on ground There are just so many blades of grass and there are just so many sentences Language, in certain extent, was infinite when one had to use pens and papers That was the time that the mankind has not yet got out of the earth’s atmosphere

The year 1961, according to Garside, Leech and McEnery (1997:1), is the date

to which corpus linguists can look back as the date when the enterprise now known as corpus linguistics (or more precisely computer corpus linguistics) came into being From then on, corpora have not been built up with pens and papers but with – as the name suggested – computer In the last 50 years, people have observed the dazzlingly development of computer technology The development has entailed the extremely quickly expanding in modern linguistics –that is corpus linguistics Such development has not only increased the size of corpora but also the corpus-based methods in teaching of English for Specific Purposes (ESP)

Briefly, corpus linguistics is an empirical approach to language description and analysis whose fundamental principle can be summed up in the following statement:

“All language description should be based on authentic language use” (Anh, 2000:214) In other words, what Chomsky said has been turned down with corpus linguistics With the youngest linguistics, it will be empiricism rather than rationalism;

it will be performance rather than competence; and it will be observations rather than theories Kennedy (1999:7) has noted that the focus of study is on performance rather than competence, and on observation of language in use leading to theory rather than vice versa In fact, positions relating to the language have already been changed during the time, which contributes largely to the amazing development of corpus linguistics Sinclair (1991:4) maintained that the positions towards language has been changed swiftly about considering language in real life as the evidence for the way of using language when people are able to examine large text corpora in a systematic manner which allows linguists to access to a quality of evidence that has not been available

before In the article of Corpus Linguistics and Foreign Language Teaching in

Vietnam, (Vuõ Thò Phöông Anh, 2000: 215-216) summarized Sinclar’s ideas into five

main issues as follows:

1 Language research should start from authentic language

2 Language description should be based on empirical evidence that is evidence collected from the language in use

3 Language should be examined in its total context of use

4 The validity of corpus-based research findings depends completely on the quality of the corpus being used Using a corpus which is inappropriate for one’s research purpose(s) will certainly lead to findings that are not valid

5 Language is constantly in the process of change; therefore, language corpora need to be constantly expanded and updated so that new and emerging features of languages operations can be captured

Thus, corpus-based second language teaching introduces learners to the real language that the native speakers use in their daily lives Learners, under corpus-based

second language teaching, may have no worry about the rules of the language They just imitate the language that native speakers use in the same context

Vuõ Thò Phöông Anh (2000:217) also suggested some applications of corpus linguistics to teaching English in the article First, corpus linguistics can accurately describe how languages operate in specific contexts and situation; and second, corpus linguistics enables the learners to independently discover the underlying rules of the language he/she is learning McEnery and Wilson (1996:184) reported that when they taught their students with traditional syntax textbooks, which contain only simple example sentences, those students often found that they were unable to analyze longer

or more complex sentences In addition, they also affirmed that a number of scholars had used corpus data to look critically at existing language teaching materials Due to the blooming of the age of computer technology, series of corpora have come into existence to serve this tendency of language researches On the website of Corpus Resource Database (CoRD), 27 main corpora with seven sub-corpora are introduced Among these corpora, English takes 24 corpora on different domains, in which Brown Corpus was the first one to be developed

2.3.1 BROWN CORPUS

According to the website of Corpus Resource Database, the Brown Corpus was the first computer-readable general corpus of texts prepared for linguistic research on modern English It was compiled by Francis and Kuera at Brown University in the 1960s It contained over 1 million words (500 samples of 2000+ words each) of running text of edited English prose printed in the United States during the calendar year 1961 There are six versions of the corpus available: the original Form A, Form B from which punctuation codes have been omitted, the tagged Form C, Bergen Forms I

& II and the Brown MARC Form

Totally, the corpus takes 5000 words from sources of data which are up to 1,015,945 words and puts those word in a list ascending from the most frequent word –

the word the – to the 5000th most frequent word – the word dreamed The most

convenience of the Brown Corpus is that the corpus shows clearly the order that a word is used and the instances that the word occurs in the sources of the data However, the corpus pays only on the words themselves and disregards the family of the words Therefore, a word can be put out of the 5000 most frequent words even

thought other words in its family are in the list For example, the word requiring is

considered a difficult word when it is put out of the 5000 most frequent words but

other words in its family as requirement (1272), required (523), require (1218) are in

the list

As the pioneer in the field of corpus linguistics, the Brown Corpus has inspired

a whole family of corpora, including the Lancaster-Oslo/Bergen Corpus (LOB), Brown's British English counterpart, as well as Frown and FLOB, the 1990s equivalents of Brown and LOB respectively

2.3.2 PAUL NATION’S 1000 MOST FREQUENT WORD FAMILIES

Paul Nation is a professor of Applied Linguistics in the School of Linguistics and Applied Language Studies at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand He has taught in Indonesia, Thailand, the United States, Finland, and Japan His specialist interests are language teaching methodology and vocabulary learning He supervises M.A and Ph.D research on vocabulary As an expert in teaching vocabulary, Paul Nation set up two lists of words for most frequent word families In the two lists, all

words in a family are put into an entry with the basis word For example, the word fair takes seven sub-words for its family; they are fairer, fairest, fairly, fairness, unfair,

unfairly Therefore, the list of the most 1000 frequent word families contains up to

4104 words, and the list of the second most 100 frequent word families contains 3707 words These lists are more sophisticated than the lists created with the Brown corpus,

as they contain not only the actual high frequency words themselves but also derivative words which may in fact not be used so frequently

Paul Nation’s lists of word families reflect learners’ ability of inferring A

learner can easily guess the meaning of the word inferring if he/she already knows the meaning of the work infer even though he/she has ever learned the word inferring

Paul Nation’s two lists of family words can be found online at the address of

families and http://www.edict.com.hk/lexiconindex/wl-2k/ for the second 1000 most frequent word families

2.4 BRITISH NATIONAL CORPUS

In this part of the thesis, an overview of British National Corpus and how to use

it is presented quite sufficiently

2.4.1 AN OVERVIEW OF BRITISH NATIONAL CORPUS

The British National Corpus is a 100 million word collection of samples of written and spoken language from a wide range of sources, designed to represent a wide cross-section of British English from the later part of the 20th century, both

spoken and written The latest edition is the BNC XML Edition, released in 2007

The written part of BNC (90%) includes, for example, extracts from regional

and national newspapers, specialist periodicals and journals for all ages and interests, academic books and popular fiction, published and unpublished letters and memoranda, school and university essays, among many other kinds of text The

spoken part (10%) consists of orthographic transcriptions of unscripted informal

conversations (recorded by volunteers selected from different age, region and social classes in a demographically balanced way) and spoken language collected in different contexts, ranging from formal business or government meetings to radio shows and phone-ins

The corpus is encoded according to the Guidelines of the Text Encoding

Initiative (TEI) to represent both the output from CLAWS (automatic part-of-speech tagger) and a variety of other structural properties of texts (e.g headings, paragraphs, lists, etc.) Full classification, contextual and bibliographic information is also included with each text in the form of a TEI-conformant header

Work on building the corpus began in 1991, and was completed in 1994 No new texts have been added after the completion of the project but the corpus was

slightly revised prior to the release of the second edition BNC World (2001) and the third edition BNC XML Edition (2007) Since the completion of the project, two sub-

corpora with material from BNC have been released separately: the BNC Sampler (a general collection of one million written words, one million spoken) and the BNC Baby (four one-million word samples from four different genres) In this corpus, there are four sorts of corpus as follows:

 Monolingual: It deals with modern British English, not other languages

used in Britain However non-British English and foreign language words

do occur in the corpus

 Synchronic: It covers British English of the late twentieth century, rather

than the historical development which produced it

 General: It includes many different styles and varieties, and is not limited to

any particular subject field, genre or register In particular, it contains examples of both spoken and written language

 Sample: For written sources, samples of 45,000 words are taken from

various parts of single-author texts Shorter texts up to a maximum of 45,000 words, or multi-author texts such as magazines and newspapers, are included in full Sampling allows for a wider coverage of texts within the

100 million limits, and avoids over-representing idiosyncratic texts

2.4.2 HOW TO USE BRITISH NATIONAL CORPUS

British National Corpus is not difficult and complex to use But it requires the user a computer connected to Internet The user can use any Web search engine, such

as Google.com, Yahoo.com, or Bing.com However, in this study, only Google.com is used as a sample

From the interface of Google.com, the user simply types the three letters BNC,

then the search engine will show a list of links in which there is “[bnc] British National Corpus” Double-clicking on this link, the user then has a page in which there

is a box for looking up the context containing the word or phrase typed in the box

When a word or phrase is typed in the box and the “Go” box is activated, the

user will go to the page of “results of your search” In this page, on the third line, the

user can know how many times the word or the phrase typed has in the corpus For

example, with the phrase “on the river”, the user can see in the corpus that the phrase

appears up to 501 times

Figure 1: The interface of British National Corpus

However, with the phrase “under the river”, it only appears 11 times

Figure 2: The results of searching for the phrase “on the river” with 501 times

Figure 3: The results of searching for the phrase “under the river” with only 11 times

2.5 SUMMARY

This chapter has presented the literature related to the issues raised in the research questions Firstly, students’ errors in the use of English prepositions are emphasized in the errors in the use of English prepositions section Secondly, an introduction to Corpus Linguistics, including Brown Corpus and Paul Nation’s 100 most frequent word families is presented Finally, an overview of British National Corpus as well as how to use it is also presented

CHAPTER 3 RESEARCH METHODOLOGY

As mentioned in the introduction, the aim of the study is to investigate and find

out (1) the student subjects’ common errors in dealing with English prepositions; (2)

the student subjects’ common errors in terms of spatial meanings, temporal meanings

and logical meanings of prepositions; and (3) the student subjects’ improvement in the

use of English prepositions after applying British National Corpus

In the previous chapters, the hypotheses as well as the prior researchers’ findings relevant to the study were clarified Based upon the theoretical fundamentals, this research was designed and carried out through a set of questionnaire, three tests in preposition and an exam paper

This chapter consists of 5 sections: (1) research design, (2) subjects, (3) research procedures, (4) instruments and materials, and (5) summary

3.1 RESEARCH DESIGN

A combination of qualitative and quantitative research was used in the study The research investigated the common errors in the use of English prepositions in dealing with the preposition itself; and in terms of the spatial meanings, temporal meanings and logical meanings of the prepositions with a population of 104 non-majored English third-year students in two classes at the UNS in the academic years of 2007-2008 and 2008-2009 The research also remarked the performance of those students when they were instructed to use BNC to learn English prepositions

In addition, a set of questionnaire was delivered to student subjects at the end of the courses to investigate the effect of BNC on those students with the aspect of the use of English prepositions

As the syllabus required, student subjects had seven periods for learning prepositions These periods were distributed in fifteen meetings of each course Each

meeting consisted of four periods The details of these periods would be discussed in the section of research procedures below

The students of the two classes were assigned to do three tests on English prepositions during the course and to take part in a final exam at the end of the course The papers that these students did for three tests with 150 preposition questions and the final exam with ten questions about prepositions, as well as 104 questionnaires would

be taken into analysis for the research

3.2 SUBJECTS

The study was carried out at the first term of the two academic years of

2007-2008 and 2007-2008-2009 at the University of Natural Sciences with totally 104 students The student belonged to faculty of Information Technology at the UNS The research was carried out on 104 non-majored English students, including 55 students in the academic year of 2007-2008 (1st group) and 49 students in the academic year of 2008-

2009 (2nd group) Those students were studying in the first term of their third year at university Their ages were ranged from 20 to 23

3.3 RESEARCH PROCEDURES

The following procedures were applied similarly to the two classes:

 Step 1: Teaching English prepositions with BNC

The student subjects in the two classes, including one class in the academic year of 2007-2008 and the other in the academic year of 2008-

2009, were taught with the following schedule:

 Period 1: The teacher instructed how to use BNC; the students

got homework 1 (50 questions on prepositions)

 Period 2: The teacher corrected homework 1; the students got

homework 2 (50 questions on prepositions)