Error Analysis in the Use of Prepositions in Texts Written by German-Speaking Learners of Spanish as Second Language

A Corpus Study

Abstract

This article presents the results of an error analysis regarding the use of prepositions, and it was carried out on 86 compositions (16,365 words) written by 31 German-speaking students with different levels of Spanish (A2, B1, B2, and C1) which were taken from the Corpus for the Analysis of Errors by Learners of Spanish as a Foreign Language (Corpus para el Análisis de Errores de Aprendices de E/LE, CORANE; Cestero & Penadés, 2009). The objectives of this investigation are (1) to identify the prepositions that cause the most difficulties for the German-speaking learner of Spanish L2; (2) to locate, describe, and explain the category of errors (as errors of selection, omission or addition) and the value associated with the prepositions; (3) to establish a typology of the most frequent errors; and (4) to study the error rate in relation to the domain of the L2. We have followed the methodology proposed by Santos (2004), and we have classified the errors with a descriptive/linguistic criterion. The results show that the prepositions which are most difficult to learn are ‘por’, ‘a’, ‘para’, ‘en’, ‘de’ and ‘con’. On the one hand, most frequent errors are caused by the wrong choice of prepositions, followed by omission and then addition; on the other hand, the number of errors corresponding to idiomatic values (particularly in cases of prepositional regimen and prepositional phrases) is lower than the number of errors related to the general values of prepositions (especially in circumstantial, name and direct person complements). Finally, a decrease in the error rate is confirmed as the domain level of the L2 increases.