Problematic Prepositions for Swedish Students of English

Abstract: This study investigates prepositional errors that Swedish 16-year-old students of English produce. The study attempts to understand why English L2 students in Sweden struggle with prepositions by looking at research within the SLA field regarding transfer, interlanguage transfer, implicit and explicit learning. The only extra-linguistic variable included in the study is the variable of gender. The method used to investigate students’ prepositional errors was to hand out a two-part test on prepositions to the students in one Grade 9 class in Sweden. The data was then analyzed and categorized to identify in what construction (PP as adjectival complements, PP as verb complements or PP as adverbials) Swedish students of English produce the most errors. The first part of the test was a fill-in-the-blanks test investigating the students’ productive knowledge. The second part of the test was a grammatical judgement test (GJT) assessing the students’ receptive knowledge. The test was divided into two different parts not to favor one particular test form. The test included a total of 22 students from one class, including 12 male and 10 female students. 8 out of the 22 students answered that they had another L1 than Swedish. A majority of these have lived in Sweden their whole lives, and only two answered that they arrived later in life. In contrast with earlier research and statistics, which show that female students perform academically better than male students, the test showed a clear advantage by the male students in the class. The male students performed better on both parts of the test. The most problematic PP construction for both genders was PP functioning as adjectives. The most common prepositional error that the students performed in the test was negative transfer from Swedish to English.