Perversion of Preposition Application as Barrier to Effective Scholarly Writing in Nigerian Higher Institutions

The present study aims to explore writing problems of English major undergraduate students at Federal Universities in Nigeria. The population of this study comprised of 8,231 Fourth Year Undergraduate Students of English Major from the 43 public (Federal) universities in Nigeria who are in their first semester of the academic year 2018/2019. The study was conducted on the randomly selected 600 English major undergraduate students from the five selected universities. The instruments used to gather data in this study were (1) a preposition test which was constructed by the researcher and (2) a questionnaire which was constructed by the researcher in order to elicit information concerning the causes of preposition errors made by students in Nigeria. In order to ensure the validity of the preposition test and the questionnaire, the instruments were shown to a panel of two university professors and two English teachers in secondary schools. The final form of the two instruments was drawn out after taking their comments, opinions and advice into consideration. Cronbach‟s alpha reliability was computed for the preposition test and the questionnaire revealed that the tools are stable (α = 0.868 and α = 0.764 respectively). Mean, standard deviation, percentages and Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) were used to answer the research questions and test the hypothesis at 0.05 significant level. The findings of this study revealed that Nigerian Undergraduate students encounter problems in using prepositions „on‟ and „in‟; the cause of preposition errors are native language interference, the learners‟ inadequate knowledge of the target language, unawareness of multiple meanings and functions of English prepositions, grammatical weakness and lack of vocabulary and motivation and there is no significant difference in the preposition test scores of students based on their institutions. The study recommended amongst others that there is no significant difference in the preposition test scores of students based on their institutions.