What strategies help avoid preposition mistakes in English

Strategies to avoid preposition mistakes in English include focused practice on preposition use, awareness of language transfer issues, and learning common collocations and fixed phrases. Key approaches are:

1. Study prepositions in context rather than isolation, using authentic sentences to understand correct usage patterns.
2. Learn common verb-preposition and noun-preposition combinations to reduce guesswork.
3. Practice with personalized exercises and fill-in-the-blank activities that reinforce correct preposition choice.
4. Be mindful of differences between English prepositions and those in your first language to avoid negative transfer errors.
5. Read widely and pay attention to prepositions in well-edited texts to internalize usage norms.
6. Reduce overuse of consecutive prepositional phrases to maintain clarity in writing.
7. Use grammar checkers or tools designed to detect and suggest corrections for preposition errors.

These strategies help learners recognize and correct preposition errors by improving understanding, exposure, and deliberate practice. ^{1, 5, 6, 8, 10}

Références

• An Experimental Study of the Use of Prepositions in College Students’English Writing from the Perspective of Language Transfer

• Learners’ language challenges in writing English

• The Acquisition of Phrasal Verbs in L2 English: A Literature Review

• Avoiding prepositional pile-up

• When English clashes with other languages: Insights and cautions from the Writer’s Craft series

• Investigating Preposition Usage Problems of English Language Education Study Program Students

• The Prepositional Errors in Students’ Writing

• Personalized Exercises for Preposition Learning

• Common informative writing errors among junior high school students: input to lesson exemplars

• Model Combination for Correcting Preposition Selection Errors

• Grammatical Error Correction: A Survey of the State of the Art