English-as-a-Second-Language (ESL) students in general, and Chinese speakers in particular, often omit or misuse English prepositions in speaking or writing. A study traced the history and structure of the English preposition, using contrastive analysis and error analysis to find sources of Chinese error. To determine if Chinese speakers exceed other ESL groups in preposition error patterns, 107 college ESL students (with 14 native speakers as controls) were tested with an open cloze test for preposition use. Results revealed that Chinese speakers had only slightly greater difficulty on the test in comparison with a general ESL group. Vietnamese students scored considerably lower. The Chinese outscored the group overall on questions involving scientific content despite lower overall test scores. The control group outscored all ESL groups but scored lower than expected. The test appeared to have high reliability. A brief curriculum is presented, developed as a result of the study, for teaching prepositions. The Cloze test, test results, and interpretations are also included. (Author/MSE)