complex English structure, including prepositional verbs, which they could apply in their writings.
B. Problem Formulation
Based on the background, there are two problems addressed in this research. They are:
1. What are prepositional verb errors in students’ Academic Essay Writing class assignments?
2. What efforts should be done to minimize the students’ prepositional verb errors in their writing?
C. Problem Limitation
This research is concerned with preposition combination errors made by ELESP students. The types of preposition combinations involve verbs, adjectives,
and nouns plus prepositions. Although there are many possibilities of the preposition combination errors, this research would only describe the students’ errors in the
combination of verbs and prepositions or prepositional verbs in Academic Essay Writing class assignments. Prepositional verb errors are chosen because verbs are
regarded as the mostly used part of speech since every sentence needs a verb. Therefore, the number of the errors is larger than that of other kinds of preposition
combinations, either adjectives plus prepositions or nouns plus prepositions.
The Academic Essay Writing class is chosen in this research because it is taught in the fifth semester of ELESP, where the students are assumed to have
acquired adequate competence in writing. Knowing their prepositional verb errors would give insight into their English accuracy and help them to produce more
accurate writings, especially for their undergraduate thesis later. Then, this research would find the recommended solutions to minimize this problem.
D. Research Objectives
This research is conducted in order to answer the questions stated in the problem formulation. Thus, the objectives of this research are to find out:
1. The prepositional verb errors in the students’ Academic Essay Writing class assignments.
2. The efforts should be done to minimize the students’ prepositional verbs errors.
E. Research Benefits
The result of this research is expected to be beneficial for advanced English learners, especially the ELESP students as English teacher candidates, and the readers
of this thesis in general. First, the learners would recognize and be careful about prepositional verb errors. Furthermore, they would be aware of the accuracy in
writing, especially in applying prepositional verbs. This would help them produce quality writings. Besides, this research is significant for ELESP students, especially
after they graduate, because prepositional verb errors in their writing would affect the
readers. As the ELESP graduates, they are assumed to have good proficiency of English. It means that they are considered to be good role models for the readers of
their writings. Therefore, if the readers are lower level English users, they might imitate the same errors as what the writer does in producing their own writings.
Nevertheless, for the advanced English readers, the errors would disturb and confuse them. As a result, they would doubt the proficiency of the writers. Second, for
English teacher candidates, the result of this research would bring awareness of prepositional verb errors in teaching their students so that they could guide their
students to produce accurate language. In addition, they could apply recommended solutions presented in this research to the problem of prepositional verb errors that
they find in their teaching. Third, the readers of this thesis in general are expected to be more aware of the significance of prepositional verbs in English language.
F. Definition of Terms
