An error analysis of Persian prepositions made by Arab learners

Due to the vital role of prepositions in Persian sentence structure, they are considered among the most frequent words in this language. Hence, teaching these words to non-native speakers of Persian is one of the important aspects of teaching Persian as a second language. This study attempts to investigate preposition errors made by Arab students learning Persian based on the theory of error analysis. To conduct the study, 50 Arab speakers learning Persian as a second language in the Center of Teaching Persian to non-Persian speakers at Ferdowsi University of Mashhad participated in the study. The gathered data from their composition writing are divided into three categories of errors in terms of their origin to “inter lingual”, “intra lingual” and “ambiguous”, and into three categories in terms of their type including “substitution”, “deletion” and “addition”. The findings of the study revealed that the highest percentages of errors in terms of the origin are attributed “intra lingual” errors (79.50%) in terms of the origin and “addition” prepositions (65.36%) in terms of their type. In this study, statistical description of errors generated by Persian learners are also provided based on which policy makers can improve textbooks and teaching methods in this field.