A Cross-linguistic Study of Prepositions in Persian and English: The Effect of Transfer

The present paper is a contrastive study which attempts to investigate the errors made by Iranian EFL learners due to the cross-linguistic influence between their L1/SL and L2/TL language (i.e. Persian & English respectively). To meet the goals of the study, an error analysis was conducted to examine the status of different types of errors of prepositions made due to the transitional constraints between Persian and English languages. To this end, a translation task was developed by the present researcher. The translation task aimed at identifying the interlingual preposition errors caused by the process of transfer between the target language (English) and the source language (Persian). The translation task was then given to 53 adult EFL learners at intermediate level to translate the sentences from Persian into English during the allotted time. After collecting and analyzing the data, the corollaries of the study indicated that the Iranian EFL learners under investigation were faced with the errors related to the wrong and redundant use of prepositions more frequently as compared with the errors related to the omission of prepositions in L2 while translating from Persian into English. The findings might make a significant contribution to the preparation of corpus of preposition errors in Iranian EFL learners discourse and thus inform Iranian ELT practitioners and teachers of the cross-linguistic areas of difficulties concerning the acquisition of second language prepositions.