Acquisition of a few English Prepositions (on, in, at, for , around)

The acquisition of English prepositions is especially difficult for students learning English as a foreignlanguage. This paper briefly discusses how prepositions are used in English and a few of the reasonsprepositions cause problems for English language learners. First, the theoretical background ofprepositions will be discussed. This section will review Noam Chomsky’s theory of Universal Grammar,the theoretical framework of prepositions themselves, and how second language acquisition works inrelation to prepositions. Next, the specific problems of prepositions will be discussed; namely, themismatch of prepositions in different languages and the inconsistency of prepositions in English. Inresponse to these problems, a new theory, called Cognitive Linguistics, will be introduced and explained.Finally, a new teaching strategy based on Cognitive Linguistics will be presented. It is hoped that thisteaching strategy can be used and applied to a regular classroom, thus improving how Englishprepositions are taught to EFL learners.