What Goes Where? : Swedish learners of English and the issue of English prepositions

Abstract: This paper examines 37 Swedish EFL students’ usage and knowledge of the English prepositions to, in, at, of and for by the use of a fill-in-the-gaps questionnaire. The students studied the course English 5 at a Swedish high school. Two teachers were also interviewed regarding their attitudes and views on teaching and learning English prepositions. Prepositions are deemed as a particular difficult word class to master when learning a new language and despite Swedish and English being closely related languages, English prepositions pose difficulties for Swedish learners of English as well.  This paper found that among the 37 students who participated, the preposition for correlated to most errors and the preposition to correlated to the least errors. This is in contrast to a previous finding which suggested that to correlated to the most errors. Moreover, the teachers interviewed in this paper did not view prepositions as a central issue of English language learning. According to the teachers, vocabulary and when to use formal or informal language were more central issues.