Interlingual or Intralingual Errors in the Use of Prepositions and Articles

Abstract

Many students in our department make a lot of errors in the use of prepositions and articles in their written productions. These errors contain valuable information on the strategies used by them to acquire English as a foreign language. It is through error analysis that the teacher can assess learning and teaching and determine the priorities for future efforts. The aim of this article is to identify, describe and explain students‟ errors in the use of prepositions and articles at Biskra University based. This serves as an empirical evidence to prove that the problem exists and to corroborate or refute the hypothesis that learners‟ difficulties are due either to interlingual or intralingual interference. For this purpose, a corpus drawn from the written productions of 92 first-year students of English was used to test the formulated hypothesis. The results obtained in this research study revealed that 79, 15 % of the errors made in preposition and 72,85% in articles were caused by negative transfer of the Arabic language, the remaining ones were due to overgeneralization and false concepts. To conclude, students‟ attention should be drawn on the difference between Arabic and English use of preposition and articles. They also need to be exposed more to the difficulties which may be encountered in the target language in order to internalize them and then to be able to use them appropriately