Analyzing Iranian learners’ Errors: The Case Study of Spatial and Temporal Prepositions in Russian language

Iranian learners of the Russian language face numerous problems when learning the Russian grammar. One of these problems is the complexity of Russian prepositions, especially spatial and temporal prepositions in comparison with the Persian language. Since the task of the teacher is to facilitate the learning environment, to improve the learning process and to classify the content of learning from a logical point of view, it is necessary, first of all, to identify students' errors and study the causes of their occurrence. At the next stage, the teacher needs to think about ways to overcome these mistakes. The main objective of this study is to classify the frequent errors of Iranian students who use the spatial and temporal prepositions of Russian by identifying the reasons for their occurrence and the ways to overcome them. The corpus of the present study consists of 150 students of the middle stage of Allame Tabatabaei University. Research methodology is experimental –descriptive. The results of the study show that the most frequent errors in the application of spatial and temporal prepositions are associated with the interference between the native and the studied language, and the possibility of using simple Russian prepositions with several cases. Strategies are also being shown to reduce errors, among which the most important is the introduction of the subject “teaching prepositions” into the program of teaching Russian in Iran and teaching students to think in Russian, rather than translating Persian thoughts.