Teaching English Time Prepositions Using Mnemonics

A challenging grammatical category that learners of English must acquire is prepositions. We describe a preliminary study to investigate a technique inspired by Skill Acquisition Theory (SAT) to help English language learners acquire accurate use of temporal prepositions. Study participants were taught four mnemonics covering basic usage of the temporal prepositions at, in (in two distinct usage patterns), on, for, from, since, and until. The experimental group displayed significant improvement using all four mnemonics when performance before and after instruction was compared. A control group, not provided instruction, displayed no improvement between the pre-test and post-test. These findings suggest such mnemonics have the potential to help students achieve higher accuracy rates in the appropriate use of temporal prepositions, provided students understand the instruction and can proceduralize the grammatical patterns by using the mnemonics, which function to encapsulate the instruction. Therefore, these results suggest that more in-depth research would be beneficial.