Teaching English prepositions to Spanish speakers: Some aspects to bear in mind

Abstract

This paper focuses on English prepositions, whose importance is due, among other reasons, to their high frequency of occurrence. Teaching them to Spanish speakers proves to be a hard task which involves dealing with two different disciplines: (Applied) Linguistics and ELT. Firstly, attention will be paid to their morphological, syntactic, and semantic complexity and fuzziness. Secondly, as for ELT, some books concerned with this topic have been published. Moreover, there are projects, such as PrepNet (http://www.irit.fr/recherches/ILPL/prepnet.html), which are aimed at describing the syntax and the semantics of prepositions within a multilingual perspective. From our own teaching experience, we can conclude that this issue is relevant enough so as to make us investigate the problems Spanish speakers face when learning English prepositions.