Prepositional errors in Spanska 4 in the Swedish upper secondary school : An analysis of errors regarding the prepositions a, de, en, para and por

This study analyses prepositional errors in Spanska 4 in the Swedish upper secondary school. The analysis focuses on errors regarding the prepositions a, de, en, para and por, as well as errors in sentences without preposition. The aim of this study is to determine which of these prepositions caused most erroneous answers and why. Possible differences according to native language are also analysed. In the investigation 65 students completed a task of filling out the missing prepositions in 24 sentences. The sentences with the preposition a and the sentences without preposition resulted in most erroneous answers. The most common mistake was to answer that there was no need for a preposition where the preposition a should have been used, and vice versa. In these cases, a possible reason for the error was linguistic transfer of the Swedish sentence. Regarding sentences with the preposition de, the students struggled the most with completing them when the preposition did not carry any meaning. Completing sentences with the preposition para was more challenging when it indicated the destination or recipient than when it indicated the intention. Furthermore, it was more common for students to respond with para where the correct answer was por than vice versa