The Acquisition of English Prepositions for L1 Mandarin Speakers Focus on Monosyllabic Prepositions

Abstract

Prepositions, the semantic elements used when describing locations or time, have been very crucial elements to acquire especially
for those learning English as a target language (TL). The ability to use any type of prepositions when define a location, space or time is the basic skill in language usage (Rodrigues et al, 2020). The different meanings of most English prepositions are arbitrary which makes the acquisition significant (Quirk et al, 1985). Through time, it has been identified that the difficulties second language learners experience are mostly
shown by their errors.
??As Zhang (2011) pointed out, Mandarin and English differ in spatial prepositions. This paper will focus on the difficulties in acquiring
prepositions from behaviorism and functional approaches. From the behaviorism (Skinner, 1957) point of view, habit formation plays a key
role. The habits formed by second language (L2) learners when learning their native language (NL) or first language (L1) was transferred
when learning L2, known as L1 transfer. Additionally, fossilization is also a cause of difficulty, as well as the lack of input, which was originated by Van Patten(1996). Moreover, the form-meaning connection is also essential and important when processing linguistic features (Benati,
2013). These abovesaid concepts will be discussed more in-depth regarding spatial prepositions in SLA supported with literature. The final
section of this piece will provide some pedagogical strategies referring to the proposed difficulties, based on previous literature.