Prepositions as a Challenge in Teaching and Learning Spanish by Native Serbian Speakers: the case of por

Abstract

This paper relies on the fact that learning prepositions presents a significant challenge for Serbian native speakers studying Spanish. The investigation is developed from the methodological principles of contrastive linguistics and its purpose is to undertake a thorough analysis of the preposition por, which seems to be particularly complex, and to draw relevant conclusions for teaching and learning. After examining why prepositions are often a stumbling block in the classroom, as well as the benefits of contrastive analysis and the language awareness approach, syntactic values of the preposition por and its equivalents in Serbian are explained. In the second part of the paper the combinations of prepositions containing por and the equivalent Serbian forms are explored: the analysis is based on a corpus made of four novels. A fundamental distinction with regard to prepositions is the lack of grammatical cases in Spanish versus Serbian; additionally, prepositional combinations are less common in Serbian. In light of this, the introduction of contrastive analysis tasks, through translation, is proposed, because it is reckoned to be valuable for perfecting the linguistic competence of Serbian students