This section discusses in detail the students’ difficulties in mastering prepositions of place at, in and on. The discussion is only on the prepositions of place
at , in and on in which the students’ achievement was below the standard of mastery
that was already determine in the first place.
a. The Students’ Difficulties in Mastering Preposition of Place at
From the previous discussion see table 4.9, type of preposition of place at contributed the highest erroneous items. Their achievement was only 46.83 which
means below the standard that was already determined before 56. From 425 items tested, they achieved 199 of correct answer. From 226 erroneous items, 167
erroneous were made in test part I and 59 items in test part II. Some of their errors are listed as follow:
1 Item number 6 part I: I met a beautiful girl…a village on the way to Nice.
In this item, there were only six students answered correctly. All of students who answered incorrectly 19 students used preposition of place in to answer the
question above. Since the village in the sentence seen as a point on a journey, then, the correct answer is:
I met a beautiful girl at a village on the way to Nice. From the result and explanation above, it is obvious that the students had difficulties
in their attempt to master the preposition of at. Students’ lack of knowledge of the rules underlying the preposition of place at caused the difficulty to them.
2 Item number 18 part I: You may write down your name…the bottom of this page.
There were 16 students answered this item incorrectly. Three of them answered using the preposition of place in and thirteen of them replaced it by
preposition of place on. Preposition of place at is considered as dimension-type 0 and function to show the exact points. Considering the theory, the correct answer should
be: You may write down your name at the bottom of this page.
Most of the students answered this items using preposition of place on. They probably considered the page in the sentence as a surface whereas preposition of
place on would be fitted. 3 Item number 32 part I:
There are many cars are waiting…the traffic light. There were nine students answered this item correctly. From 17 erroneous,
nine students used preposition of place on to complete the sentence and eight of them replaced the preposition of place at by preposition of place in. Preposition of place at
is used when subject has the stationary relationship with unspecified dimension. In other words, the subjects occupy more or less the same position as the indicated
places without specifying dimensions. Then, the correct answer for the items is: There are many cars are waiting at the traffic light.
4 Item number 6 part II:
Seorang pria berdiri di pemberhentian bus. Eight students answered this item correctly. Eight students also used
preposition of place on instead of preposition of place at. The rest of them 9 students used preposition of place in as the answer. The proper translation to this
item is: A man stands at the bus stop. Preposition of place at was used in this sentence since the subjects a man occupy
more or less the same position as the indicated places without specifying dimensions.
b. The Students Difficulties in Mastering Preposition of Place in
