A Cross-linguistic Study of English and Persian Prepositions

Abstract

This paper has tried to show that the errors that Persian learners of English mostly commit in using English prepositions have root in their L1. In other words, using wrong preposition, addition of an unnecessary preposition, or deletion of prepositions are often because students tend to transfer their intended meanings to English in the same way they are expressed in Persian. Firstly, the word contrastive analysis was discussed in detail, history of contrastive analysis and two version of contrastive analysis were presented. Secondly a cross – linguistic analysis of English and Persian prepositions in the field of technology, computer, management, education, research, anthropology, psychology, philosophy, translation and semantic were discussed. Thirdly, the applied comparative and contrastive was discussed. 11 couples of technical words with their definitions have been randomly searched on the internet and selected. Fourthly, some predictions of errors in the process of learning were offered. Finally, some pedagogical explanations in order to show significant of contrastive analysis in language teaching were discussed. Results show that most Persian students who learn English language make these kinds of errors. Therefore, language teachers are highly recommended to guide their learners to prevent these errors and also to increase their chance of learning a language.