Pre-Supposed ……Preposition
- dnyaneshchaudhari0
- Sep 4
- 3 min read
S. Indira Narayan is an educationist with more than 35 years of rich experience in the teaching field. She has held multiple portfolios. She has been associated with St. Ann’s High School, ICSE, ISC, Secunderabad, for over three decades, teaching English language and English literature for classes 10, 11 and 12. The last portfolio she held was as Academic Coordinator, St. Ann's High School, at Kompally Hyderabad, under the same management.
Indira Narayan has conducted numerous workshops for school teachers and continues to do so. She is also interested in writing and blogs regularly on http://vinplaksha.wordpress.com/
There was an announcement over the mike at a Regional Community Function:
“We will now have a running race to ladies.”
It was an Annual Day Function and sports were being conducted for children and adults. The race for children was done and then came this announcement. While some ladies stood up wanting to participate, one gentleman also stood up saying, “I will go”. On asking him why he was moving towards the track, he turned around and with a tongue-in-cheek expression said, “They have announced a running race TO ladies.”
No offence meant. The purpose of narrating this is to throw light on the misuse of
prepositions and the meanings they can convey. Such errors do occur many times, but we
tend to overlook them, giving the benefit of the doubt to the person not being very conversant with the English language, yet desirous of speaking it.
In school, when we were taught letter writing, we would start the letter generally with, ‘How are you? Hope you are fine. I am well!’
Here is a reply given: “Hello, glad to know that you are fine. I am in the well .’ Total change in meaning. Instead of conveying that the person is well and doing fine, the two words ‘in the’ take the meaning into a completely different context. If we were to visualise this, it would make us smile.
“Did you see Harsh?” asked the teacher to her student standing in front of her. Harsh was also one of her students. “Yes, ma’am, he just passed away in the corridor and went straight.”
“It is passed by and not passed away,” was the teacher’s response.
As you can see, each of the above wrongly used prepositions has a different meaning than what was intended. The first one, ‘running to the ladies’, meant that a person was running towards a lady standing some distance away! The idea of the sport or the race does not feature at all. In the second one, it suggests that the person is inside a well and it has nothing to do with the statement that he or she is fine!
Prepositions can be very confusing. Mother tongue interference does not make it better!
‘Meet me behind the school once the home bell rings.’ It was a teacher’s instruction to an errant pupil. Hope the child understood that he was to meet his teacher after school. This was an example of mother tongue interference. Such examples of language interference can be seen in many languages.
In school, teach children to think in English and make sentences. Help them avoid phrasing their words by first forming them in their mother tongue. This confuses, delays and ends up with the sentence being wrong.
It is not about the correct use of a preposition; we should also teach when a preposition is not required. For ‘check up on,’ can simply be written as ‘check on.’
As mentioned earlier in this article, prepositions can be very confusing. A person adept in English can have doubts once in a while about choosing the right preposition. English grammar and parts of speech are taught from the primary section. Parts of speech, along with their basic definitions, are taught in more detail as students progress through grades each year. But like in most subjects, if the initial drilling is absent and the foundation is not thorough, then grammar becomes a subject to avoid because it can be so confusing! What a student is not comfortable with slowly becomes a kind of fear that mars learning. When mistakes of wrong usage are often corrected, confidence levels begin to decrease.
A certain way of drilling in teaching prepositions (or other parts of speech) can be helpful to the student.
By using the blackboard, the teacher can write down all the necessary definitions and details about parts of speech and introduce them orally.
Explain the use and importance of a preposition. Using materials available, such as the table, duster, pencil, book, etc., some prepositions can be explained. A visual effect can help.
List a few of the words in question and make students repeat them.
The teacher can write about 5 to 10 simple sentences underlining the Prepositions.
Explain and ask the class to say them aloud at least 3 times.
Erase the preposition and ask the class, maybe one at a time, to recall the word.
Before going to the next point of teaching, give a written test (with an advance notice) on the different sentences ( on prepositions) worked out ( by way of class work or homework)
Some subjects can be learnt only by working out exercises on a daily basis. English Grammar falls in this category, as does Mathematics. Both these cannot be learnt by reading, they have to be worked out. Not an easy task, teaching or learning good English.