Investigating Iraqi Preparatory School Pupils' Knowledge of English Prepositions of Time and Place

Abstract

English language is an international language that many people worldwide, including Iraq, try to learn. As such, teaching and learning English as a foreign language has taken an outstanding position in the educational system of the country.            Grammar is essential regardless of whether a language is taught or learnt, and without grammar, no one can correctly write or speak language. There are many grammatical components including prepositions which play a crucial role as they form a crucial part of the structure of both spoken and written English. The proper  use of prepositions usually indicates the speaker or writer's ability ability on the part of the speaker or writer to select the right preposition and put it in its right position within the utterance or the sentence. On this basis, teaching the prepositions of English and implying them within the curricula at the different studying levels have been heavily heeded by English language textbook designers. Yet, Iraqi learners  of English find it difficult to use prepositions, mainly those of time and place, appropriately as they fail to choose the right prepsitions in, on, at of time and place, and put them in the right context. Setting out from this problematic issue, the current research aims at probing Iraqi secondary pupils' knowledge of the English prepositions of time and place, namely at, on and in at both comprehension and recognition levels. It is hypothesized that Iraqi secondary school pupils do not have good control over the use of prepositions of time and place already referred to and that there are no differences between pupils of urban and rural schools as far as their knowledge of the prepositions of time and place is concerned. To bring about the preceding aims and validate the relevant hypotheses, a test of 40 items (20 on the prepositions of time and 20 on the prepositions of place) has been administered to 2 samples of female pupils, 20 pupils each, at two preparatory schools (a school inside the city of Mosul and another outside the city of Mosul) to investigate their knowledge of the prepositions in question in termns of comprehending and recognizing them. The findings  show a low performance by both samples of pupils with a slight difference in  favour of the sample of pupils of the urban school.