CONTRASTIVE ANALYSIS OF PREPOSITIONAL ERRORS

This quantitative study attempts to examine the English prepositional errors exhibited in the written specimen of secondary school students of Pakistan while learning English as their second language. Error analysis is used in this study, as a method of diagnosing errors in the written compositions. Cordor (1973) classified errors into four categories: omission, addition, substitution and disordering. Moreover, errors may be interlingual i.e. L1 or mother tongue influence as suggested by James (1998). Along with this, moderate version of Contrastive Analysis Hypothesis (CAH) is used as a method for describing prepositional systems of Urdu and English languages as Bloomfield (1933) , Fries (1945) and Lado (1957) claimed that by comparing the systems of the native language and language to be learned, predictions could be made about possible difficulties in learning. The study sample was composed of 100 written compositions collected from randomly selected different private and Government secondary schools in Sargodha. This paper will highlight the identification, description, categorization and explanation of errors found in the gathered written data. The findings conclude that interference of Urdu (L1 of learners) is maximum as the results exhibit the dominance of inters language in prepositional errors. Further, this study suggests the need for exploring new teaching strategies particularly to teach tricky areas of second language i.e. prepositions