Prepositions and the acquisition of English prepositions
English prepositions are notoriously difficult to learn, and even ESL/EFL
students with high level of English proficiency have difficulty with the use of prepositions
(Celce-Murcia & Larsen-Freeman, 1999). According to Celce-Murcia and
Larsen-Freeman, a reason for this difficulty is that prepositions do not always match
up well from one language to another. For Thai students, English prepositions can be
especially difficult because there are many instances where a preposition is needed in
English when it is not needed in Thai.
Example: English I waited for you.
Thai ฉัน คอย เธอ
(Chan koy ter)
I waited you.
In other cases, a preposition is needed in English, but in Thai a different part of
speech is needed.
Example English Mother made this cake for me.
Thai แม่ ทำ เค้ก ให้ ฉัน
(Mae tum cake hai chan)
Mother made cake give me.
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Kao (2001) distinguishes pseudo-prepositions from genuine prepositions,
explaining that the former type (as in rely on, or wait for) is only dummy grammatical
forms and has no real meaning in the sentence, while the latter type may be used to
show spatial relations or movements between words in a sentence (as in on/under/near/
beside the desk or went in/toward/through/by the building) and the change of one
preposition to another will essentially change the meaning. Since pseudo-prepositions
are arbitrary and have no form-meaning relationship, Kao asserts that these prepositions
are hard to learn and usually take quite a long time to learn because learners need
to rely heavily on their memorization and storage. Kao’s study (2001) suggests that
formal instruction could improve learners’ performance of these language features.
The acquisition of English prepositions has been studied by some scholars.
For example, Kao (2001) examined the acquisition of English prepositional verbs
by Japanese EFL learners focusing on the acquisition of prepositional stranding and
pied piping and found that learners tended to omit prepositions where they felt those
prepositions were communicatively redundant. Besides, the learners obviously chose
preposition stranding and used pied-piping more in relative clauses than in questions.
Due to the nature of pseudo-prepositions as mentioned above, teachers often
find it hard to introduce these prepositions to ESL/EFL learners. No rules can be
stated, nor will explicit instruction fulfill the learners’ needs and help them to acquire
these prepositions. For this reason, providing the learners with a great number of
enhanced instances of prepositional uses to allow the learners to get as much exposure
to the target features as possible may help draw the learners’ attention to these
features (Kao, 2001) and may eventually lead to the acquisition of these prepositions.
Furthermore, encouraging students to notice these linguistic features and raising their
consciousness of the existence of these features may help strengthen their learning.
This research was then conducted to investigate the effects of input enhancement on
the acquisition of English pseudo-prepositions used after verbs and adjectives of Thai
college students.