The preposition ‘a’ in written expression of Egyptian students of Spanish language

Abstract

This present investigation has two main objective: to demonstrate the importance of contrastive analysis that allows us to understand the difficulties that students suffer when they try to use correctly some structures in L2 due to the difference in their native language system or due to the subtlety of opposition of some rules in L2 which in our case would be the prepositional system, studying the case of the preposition a ´to´ in written expression of Egyptian students of Spanish language, and to shed light upon possible reasons that lead students to make fossilized errors when using the preposition ‘a’ in Spanish. The theoretical framework of the thesis is based mainly on two methodologies: contrastive analysis and error analysis. The contrastive analysis reveals the system of preposition in both the subjects’ native language, which is Arabic, and the subjects’ language of study, which is Spanish. We focus on the unique value of the preposition ila ´to´ and the preposition a ´to´ respectively. With this in mind, we begin an empirical study of the preposition a ´to´ using written samples taken from intermediate and advanced leveled Egyptian students of Spanish as a foreign language. Data were collected from a survey on the language background of the students and a writing task.