Difficulty Rankings and a Difficulty Factor in the Acquisition of English Prepositions

Abstract

This study investigated the difficulty rankings of English prepositions among Japanese learners of English (JLEs) for facilitating teaching prepositions. Six graded difficulty rankings for JLEs were proposed. It was suggested that semantic feature matching/mismatching between each preposition and its complement noun phrase or a verb before the preposition would be one of the possible factors affecting the rankings.