An Investigation of L2 Preposition Usage and Error Types: The Case of Turkish-English Bilinguals

Abstract

Acquiring L2 prepositions is a complex process, as bilinguals often find it difficult to use the correct preposition in a target language such as English. While frequency of prepositions and prepositional phrases can help this acquisition process, additional factors such as L1 influence also play an important role. Furthermore, the acquisition of L2 prepositions follows a non-linear pattern, similar to U-shaped development in L2 acquisition, making investigations across different proficiency levels crucial in understanding the whole phenomenon. Using an error-coded learner corpus, this study investigated the frequencies of L2 preposition use and error types in the essays written by Turkish-English bilinguals. Three types of preposition errors (substitution, addition, and omission) were examined across different score bands corresponding to different writing proficiency levels. Overall results showed that although the frequency of prepositions accounted for their usage in L2 for the most common 10 prepositions, error types and how they differ across score bands are also essential in understanding the developmental pattern of L2 prepositions. In line with the literature, substitution and omission errors were the most common error types. Notably, omission errors demonstrated a statistically significant U-shaped developmental pattern, while substitution errors showed a similar but non-significant descriptive tendency across proficiency bands. Addition errors, on the other hand, decreased steadily with higher score bands. The current findings offer important insights into L2 preposition error types and development for fields like psycholinguistics, bilingualism, and corpus linguistics.