Common Writing Errors Made by Iranian Students of “Arabic Language and Literature” in Writing Arabic Adpositions (Huruf ul jaar)

Adpositions (prepositions and postpositions) play a fundamental role in Arabic sentence structures. They can actually change the meaning of sentences. They may also cause ambiguity in the meaning of sentences if being used erroneously. However, it has been observed that when writing in Arabic, most of the “Arabic Language and Literature” M. A. graduates make errors in using adpositions. Therefore, what this article pursued was discovering the underlying reasons of the Arabic learners’ weaknesses in using adpositions and then, attempting to resolve them. The study was a descriptive-analytical one. The statistical population consisted of twenty Arabic Language and Literature M. A. students’ dissertations at Tarbiat Modares University and Shahid Beheshti University between 1385 and 1395. At the first phase, one page of each dissertation was surveyed as the sample; then, 40 pages of mentioned dissertations were surveyed. The results demonstrated that language learners’ errors were classified in three main categories: 1. Using the adpositions in a wrong place. 2. Using the adpositions where not needed. 3. Deleting the adpositions where they were necessary. The main errors were mostly from the first category which is the application of adpositions in wrong places. The underlying reasons for their occurrence were detected as follows: Unilateral language interference and lack of knowledge about the verbs that should be used with specific adpositions. Also, most of language learners’ errors were in applying the adpositions “باء ، لام ، من ، عن ، فی ، علی ، إلی” which have a lot of usage.