Abstract

This study aims to investigate the errors that Saudi learners of English as a Foreign Language commit in the use of English prepositions using a translation task from Arabic to English. This study aimed to investigate how these learners perform in a specific subset of tasks that involve significant differences between English and Arabic in relation to the prepositions that must be used. Thirty-five male intermediate-level learners of English as a Foreign Language at a Saudi military academy were tasked with translating 28 sentences from Arabic to English under the condition that they had a time limit to complete the task and could not use a dictionary. The learners’ answers were coded for errors within the framework of error analysis, as well as for the source of the errors, whether interlingual or intralingual. A total of 229 errors in the use of prepositions in the learners’ answers were identified from the 980 coded answers. The most common type of error was substitution error (62.4%), followed by omission errors (20.5%) and addition errors (17.0%). Most of the errors were categorized as interlingual errors (83.0%), indicating that the learners’ errors in the use of prepositions were mostly due to the differences between the two languages, while the remainder were intralingual errors (17.0%). The majority of the errors in the answers from the Saudi learners were within a limited number of prepositional phrases. These included frames that described location, movement, and verbs or adjectives that used prepositions to describe the meanings of those words. These findings indicate that there are a small number of goals for the instruction of prepositions to be targeted by teachers of English as a Foreign Language to the Saudi learners. These findings are limited to the task that was created for this study because it required learners to perform translation errors.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.