An analysis of the ways in which online teaching resources can address the issues involved in teaching prepositions to EFL learners

The word class of prepositions is complex for both native speakers of English and learners of English. Their semi-lexical, polysemous nature, as well as the differences in this category cross-linguistically create problems for teachers and learners. Errors made by learners of English using prepositions have been noted as some of the most frequent errors in many studies (Catalán (1996), Chodorow et al. (2007)).

The aim of this study is to analyse the ways in which online English language teaching resources can help prevent learner preposition errors. In order to do this, the researcher will triangulate the information about learner prepositional errors through a review of existing literature, as well as a questionnaire targeted at teachers of English as a foreign language. By understanding the common areas in which errors often occur as well as collecting advice for approaches to teaching prepositions, an analysis of teaching materials will be completed in order to analyse its content and its potential to prevent learner errors. The research will focus on resources for the prepositions at, in and on, due to existing research on these three prepositions, based on their frequency in English and the similarities in their temporal and locative senses that are distinguished through context and collocations.

Overall this research hopes to investigate the main preposition errors made by learners of English and discuss the ways in which teaching resources can aid in preventing these errors.