A Corpus-based Study on the Influence of L1 on EFL Learners’ Use of Prepositions Huei-Chun Yuan Department of English, National Taiwan Normal University, Taipei, Taiwan Abstract—The present study is a corpus-based study which aims to investigate the occurrence of salient first language (Chinese 1 ) features found in learners’ second language (English) written productions. AntConc (version 3.2.4) was adopted to analyze the learners’ written data and to establish various categories of preposition misuses and L1 features. Tango 2 was employed to provide suggestions for correction. Essentially, findings demonstrate that EFL learners may unconsciously produce L2 writings with L1 characteristics in their sentence productions. Results showed that the ten most frequently misused prepositions were by, at, in, to, for, on, about, of, with, and as. According to the results, it is suggested that, in regard to writing, teachers and educators can teach the use of prepositions through collocations to facilitate learners’ knowledge and understanding for different prepositions through different contexts. The significance of the study is to raise learners’ awareness as well as to provide reference for instruction for language teachers and educators. Index Terms—first language (L1) transfer, preposition, interlanguage, written production I. INTRODUCTION With the growing pace of globalization and internationalization, English has become a dominant language in Taiwan. Learners at all ages possess their needs to master the language. However, due to various external factors, it has been argued that learners tend to perform better with receptive skills than productive skills. For some learners, receptive skills are mastered earlier than productive skills. Notwithstanding, it is without doubt that proficient productive skills lead to successful and fluent communication. In Taiwan, how to enhance learners’ competence in English writing has constantly been discussed. With the lack of opportunity to perform written communication with foreigners outside the classroom setting and complexity of elements in the syntax, lexis, and discourse level (Bennui, 2008), English writing continues to be a challenging subject for many learners. Furthermore, Bennui (2008) stated that many teachers tend to neglect the problem of learners’ mother tongue and culture interfering in their English written productions. These types of problems may often occur for English L2 learners, especially when their L1 does not own a similar grammar system (Barrett and Chen, 2011). Thus, the goal of the present study aims to detect L1 features found from learners’ written productions, specifically in terms of learners’ preposition usages. Detecting misuses is a principle means to solving the problem. It may help to raise learners’ awareness as well as to provide reference for instruction for language teachers and educators. II. LITERATURE REVIEW Difficult Elements of English Grammar Among the elements of English grammar, articles and prepositions have often been claimed as the most common grammatical error made by non-native speakers and may apparently be the most difficult elements of English for non-native speakers to master (Chodorow, Gamon, and Tetreault, 2010). In written discourse, articles and prepositions altogether account for 20% to 50% of all grammar errors made by second language learners (Dalgish, 1985; Diab, 1997; Izumi et al., 2003). Tetreault and Chodorow (2008) found that prepositions are among the most common type of usage error in writings of English as second language (ESL) learners in China. These claims have proved evident in many EFL learners’ writings. Previous studies have also verified these claims. For example, Barrett and Chen (2011) investigated the potential errors made by Taiwanese college students and found that learners encountered problems using English articles in terms of distinguishing between a definite and indefinite noun phrase. Results also presented that more errors were made with plural nouns than with mass/non-count nouns. Another study conducted by Mahmoodzadeh (2012) looked into the misusages of prepositions made by 53 adult Iranian EFL intermediate learners. A translation task was performed to measure the participants’ usages of prepositions. The researcher reported that participants of the study made errors related to wrong use of prepositions ( wrong use) and redundant use of prepositions (redundancy) more frequently than omission of prepositions. It was implied that Iranian EFL learners tend to suffer from producing English prepositions which are grammatically redundant or wrong. 1 In the present study, “Chinese” refers to the official language used in the Republic of China, Taiwan. 2 An online collocation dictionary provided by the Natural Language Processing Lab at the Department of Computer Science, National Tsing Hua University (source: http: //candle.fl.nthu.edu.tw/collocation/webform2.aspx). ISSN 1799-2591 Theory and Practice in Language Studies, Vol. 4, No. 12, pp. 2513-2521, December 2014 © 2014 ACADEMY PUBLISHER Manufactured in Finland. doi:10.4304/tpls.4.12.2513-2521 © 2014 ACADEMY PUBLISHER