The Analysis of Errors in the Use of English Prepositions by Bosnian L1 Learners

Özet

The aim of this paper is to analyze a corpus containing samples of the English language produced by Bosnian L1 learners in a planned discourse. The specific objective is to enumerate all the errors that this convenient sample of learners makes in the use of English prepositions. Error analysis from previous research into this matter suggests that the errors in the use of the English prepositions can be classified into substitution, addition, and omission errors – the same classification used throughout this paper as well. The methods used are both quantitative and qualitative in nature. Quantitative refers to the enumeration of the errors made in the corpus, i.e. participants’ essays (N=69), which were subsequently analyzed in a qualitative manner by categorizing them into the three aforementioned categories. Additional method used was contrastive analysis between Bosnian and English. The analysis has shown that the most frequent errors are substitution errors, followed by addition and omission errors, as hypothesized in the paper. Additionally, all the errors have been qualitatively, contrastively, analyzed to determine whether any of these have been made due to the negative transfer from the participants’ mother tongue, i.e. Bosnian.