Prepositions used with adjectives in English essays written by Czech secondary school students

Abstract

This article focuses on the frequency and accuracy of dependent prepositions which complement the adjectives in CZEMATELC 2017, a corpus consisting of 390 essays from the written part of the national school-leaving exam leading to certification of secondary education in the Czech Republic. The research findings reveal that the learners used adjectives from A1 to B2 level, according to the CEFR. A limited number of A1 adjective lemmas was considerably overused, but showed the lowest proportion of dependent prepositional complementation. As learners tended not to complement the adjectives at A2 -B2 proficiency levels either, adjective-preposition collocations frequently co-occurring in native speaker corpora were identified for further remedial work. In addition, corpus-based discovery-learning was proposed as a solution because it encourages awareness and gradually leads to learner autonomy.