[01] Ali Forutan, English Department, Farhangian University of Isfahan, Isfahan, Iran. [02] Fatemeh Mehranpour, Faculty of Persian Literature and Foreign Languages, English Department, Islamic Azad University, South Tehran Branch, Tehran, Iran.

The purpose of the present study is to detect to what extent Iranian EFL learners commit errors attributable to the cross-linguistic differences between their L1(Target language) and L2( Source language). Furthermore locating the types of errors in use of prepositions (omission of prepositions, redundant or wrong use of prepositions) is among the objective of the study. In the direction of checking the status of various categories of errors of prepositions made by Iranian EFL learners as a result of the transitional limitations between Persian and English, an error analysis was performed. Therefore, the researcher developed a translation task in order to find out the interlingual preposition errors committed the participants as a result of transfer between L1 and L2. A total number of 60 male and female students studying English at the intermediate level took part in the study and carried out the translation task. The analysis of the results indicated significant differences between different types of errors made by the participants. The fact of the matter is that Iranian EFL learners had the most problems in terms of the the errors related to the redundent use of prepositions. They stood in the second position concerning the errors in the area of wrong use of prepositions and finally they had the less frequent errors with respect to the omission of prepositions in L2 while translating from Persian into English.

Contrastive Analysis, Negative Transfer, Intralingual, Error Analysis, EFL, ESL

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