This paper analyzes the theoretical background and types of proposition for Korean high school students who have the difficulties in the use of prepositions, despite years of studying English, and it also aims to describe the analysis and teaching of prepositions using theta-role to help to understand the meanings.
Most students in Korea learn English through textbooks in school as a foreign language. However, it is true that there are few opportunities to acquire prepositions systematically for students who are familiar with English classes focusing on grammar and reading. Most students who consider prepositions as things to simply memorize or idioms learn prepositions by just memorizing them. This way of learning cannot even give a chance to students to think about the basic and expanded meanings of prepositions.
In addition, there seems to be no problem to translate English prepositions to Korean because they are small in number and composed of a relatively short words', and yet Korean students are not familiar with the use of prepositions. Not only because the same prepositions convey different meanings, depending on the sentence, but there is a difference in their language characteristics. Furthermore, the meanings of prepositions are also subdivided in a dictionary, causing confusion to Korean students with the usage and meaning of prepositions.
This paper describes the classification of prepositions, based on the definition and theta-role, and analyzes the prepositions by semantic areas and their frequency, depending on the materials collected from six English textbooks for high, school freshmen. The result showed a considerable difference in the frequency of using the same preposition according to the different meaning. Therefore, through this study, this paper can propose a few ideas of how to teach the prepositions effectively.
First, the result of the study of textbooks showed that the usage of prepositions is limited in the current six kinds of textbooks. Moreover, there was a difficulty to memorize prepositions like idioms without semantic relations. Teaching prepositions through theta-role is expected to help students learn the meaning of prepositions effectively which has been considered as homophones.
Second, even though it takes time, it is suggested teaching prepositions with various learning tools to show the semantic connections between them, rather than leading students to simply memorize them for college entrance exams. It will make students more effective learners in the long run and reduce the burden of study.
Third, although this study only focused on the textbooks, it is suggested including other materials which were not covered here and continuing the comprehensive study of prepositions.