As an English teacher, I have found that the students of English face a lot of problems related to the use of prepositions. Sometimes they use wrong prepositions; at other times they omit the prepositions altogether. The first kind of error happens from the habit of translating prepositions from the first language and the second kind of error arises because some languages do not use special words to signal relationships between the nouns.

Different problems require different remedial measures. Let us first discuss the problem of students who tend to omit essential prepositions and some ways of helping them. When a student learns English as a new language, he tends to listen to it in the same way he listens to his own language. When there are no prepositions in his mother tongue, he will have little reason to look for them in English. So his perceptual mechanism omits these prepositions. In other words, some listeners never hear English preposition because their listening habits do not include hearing them. So a teacher needs to

* Develop in the students a 'set' to hear prepositions - this can be done using short paragraphs in which prepositions occur a number of times. When the paragraph is read in the class the students have to signal that they heard it.

* Give the students passages to study that contain a limited number of prepositions - they have to underline the prepositions in the passage and comprehend its usage.

* Help your students to expect prepositions to occur with their noun objects.
* Play a game - create a story and narrate to them using actions like in the palace, on the hill, across the river etc.
* Use the 'cloze' technique - a cloze technique provides a sentence frame into which a blank has been inserted - a familiar completion type exercise.
Another difficulty stems from the fact that students often have only a vague understanding of the meanings of prepositions. Then, a visual device may help students remember these relationships more easily. One such method is the system of dots, arrows and boxes. (See illustration)

The sketches however are not guaranteed to eliminate all the difficulties students might face with prepositions, but they do help to a great extent. It is practice which determines what students hear. So apart from visual aids, plenty of oral drill exercise should be given.

If these methods are followed, the problems of prepositions faced by the pupils can be reduced to a large extent.