The Acquisition of the English Spatial Prepositions: in, on, and at by Saudi EFL Students

Abstract

This study investigates the acquisition of the three English spatial prepositions: ‘in’, ‘on’, and ‘at’ by 100 Saudi EFL students within the framework of the Markedness Theory. From the markedness point of view, marked/infrequent structures are more difficult in acquisition compared to their corresponding unmarked/frequent structures. English and Arabic differ in the way they express the semantic relations of these prepositions. This is assumed to pose difficulties in learning for EFL students where learners compare the English prepositional system to that of Arabic and resort to literal translation; thus, L1 transfer takes place. The study aims to provide insight into the challenges that Arab EFL learners encounter when learning English and to fill a gap in the literature of second language acquisition regarding the acquisition of prepositions by Arab EFL learners when semantic asymmetries are attested. Results show that the unmarked preposition ‘in’ is learned easily because its Arabic equivalent ‘fi’ covers more functions in the native language. As for the prepositions ‘on’ and ‘at’, results show that participants are struggling to learn them because only a few meanings correspond between ‘on’ and its Arabic equivalent ‘ʕala’, and that Arabic lacks an equivalent for ‘at’.

Keywords:

• spatial prepositions
• language acquisition
• markedness
• semantic asymmetries
• EFL students

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank the Deanship of Scientific Research at Majmaah University for supporting this work under Project Number No. R-2023-463.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Majmaah University [grant number R-2023-463].