The use of English prepositions in lexical bundles in essays written by Korean university students

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to explore how Korean university undergraduate students use English prepositions embedded in frequently occurring multiword sequences, or lexical bundles, in their essays. Most prior research on prepositions has centered on prepositional phrases (PPs), including idiomatic expressions, identified on the basis of their structure and function. This study investigates prepositions in lexical bundles, which are identified solely on the basis of frequency in context and are therefore generally incomplete in structure. The findings show patterns of preposition use by English learners that differ from the accumulated findings on this topic in the literature. The study first identifies the types of PP-based bundles in a learner corpus built on the English writing samples of 2130 students. It then compares the learners’ uses of PP-based bundles with the uses by native speakers of English in academic prose, as documented by Biber et al. (1999). Results show that Korean learners rely heavily on a small number of PP-based bundles and underuse those that are characteristic of academic prose. A subsequent error analysis of prepositions in the learner bundles reveals an error rate of approximately 7% in 13 bundle types. More than 70% of the errors are preposition misuses. Based on these findings, this study offers suggestions for classroom materials and further research topics centering on PP-based lexical bundles.