Error analysis: analysing the use of prepositions in the writing of ESL students of Sekolah Menengah Sultan Salahuddin Abdul Aziz Shah, Shah Alam

This study is conducted to analyse the errors of prepositions made by the Form 4 students of Sekolah Menengah Kebangsaan Sultan Salahuddin Abdul Aziz Shah, Shah Alam in written compositions. 43 out of 219 students of Form 4 were selected using the method of random cluster sampling as the participants of the study. The corpus of the learner language was collected from the written compositions of the school’s Mid-Term Examination for the year 2013. The results have indicated that the students were still below par from the excellent standard of using prepositions in English. Three main types of errors were discovered, firstly, (1) the substitution error; being the most frequently occurring error with 59.4 % of errors, followed by (2) omission error with 30.1 % of errors, and lastly, (3) the addition error, with 10.5 % of errors. Next, it was identified that “at” is the most frequently misused form of preposition in the students’ written composition, followed by the prepositions “o f’ and “on”. The results from the analysis of errors have found two significant sources which play significant parts in interfering and influencing such error productions, namely; (1) interlingual source as well as (2) intralingual source. Consequently, some recommendations on the teaching pedagogy for prepositions were discussed to give treatment to the errors.