The other day, student Carl Morales posed to me this observation on my Facebook Gateway:
My classmate tells something about this page of yours on Facebook, and the enormous learnings she has gained for years because of your posts. We are both into the English language and sometimes argue as to how words should be used in writing and in speaking. Despite the eagerness we have, we still find it difficult to master the “prepositions.” They are, I think, confusing and hard to learn. In the examples below, we are not sure of the correct preposition to use.
“Employers’ experiences (on, in, with) student-employees”
“Teachers’ experiences (on, in, with) struggling students”
I hope you could help me understand this. Thank you!
My reply to Carl Morales:
You are not alone in finding it difficult to master the English prepositions, Carl. Most learners of English as a second language—meaning those who are not born to the language but need to earn it brick-by-brick, so to speak—experience the same difficulty in grasping the precise ways that particular prepositions give sense to specific utterances. The native English speaker just knows by sense or feel when a particular preposition is correctly or wrongly used in a statement. In fact, it normally takes years of exposure to English-speaking environments or a serious formal study of English and its various parts of speech—including the prepositions, of course—for the nonnative English speaker to achieve adequate fluency in speaking and writing in English.
(http://josecarilloforum.com/imgs/what's-a-preposition_flying-bird-1A1.png)
IMAGE CREDIT: MING-LISH.COM
Not surprisingly, Carl, neither you nor your classmate could be sure of which preposition is correct to use in the following incomplete sentences that you yourself presented—unless, of course, someone knowledgeable takes pains to explain the usage in excruciating detail:
(1) “Employers’ experiences (on, in, with) student-employees”
(2) “Teachers' experiences (on, in, with) struggling students”
Having encountered such sentence constructions many times before, I can tell you right off that depending on the intended context or sense, all of the three indicated preposition choices are correct for both of the two sentences you presented.
Here’s my evaluation of the preposition choices for Sentence 1:
(a) The preposition “on” is correct in the complete sentence construction “Employers’ experiences on student-employees are wide-ranging” when the intended sense of “on” is “about” or “regarding,” as in “Employers' experiences about student-employees are wide-ranging” or “Employers’ experiences regarding student-employees are wide-ranging.”
(b) The preposition “in” is correct in the complete sentence construction “Employers’ experiences in their high-aptitude student-employees are very instructive and encouraging” when the intended sense of “in” is “in the case of” as in “Employers’ experiences in the case of student-employees of high aptitude are very instructive and encouraging” (Here, “in” is the so-called ellipsis or shortened version of “in the case of”).
(c) The preposition “with” is correct in the comparative sentence construction “Employers’ experiences with student-employees as against those with their full-time college-degree-holder employees are vastly different.”
You and your friend may want to do the same kind of evaluation for the preposition choices for Sentence 2. You’ll find it surprising that preposition choice is largely determined by the sentence construction itself and the sense severally contributed by its various grammar elements.
For a deeper understanding of English preposition usage, Carl, I recommend that you read and carefully study the Forum's full-dress review of the English prepositions by clicking this link: http://josecarilloforum.com/forum/index.php?topic=7722.0
I likewise suggest that to learn more about English grammar, it’s much better for you to formally register as a Forum member so you can post your grammar questions directly in the Forum discussion board of your choice. There, we can more conveniently discuss them in greater depth and detail. (As you must have felt when you read this posting on Facebook, Carl, long explanations like this can become very cumbersome typing and reading in the form of a Facebook discussion thread.)
See you in the Forum and best of luck in your English self-improvement efforts!