Using prepositions in context

A few tips for learning and teaching prepositions of place and movement
Go with the tried and trusted basics
Following the pattern that most course books take, i.e., dealing with prepositions in manageable chunks, is not a bad way to go. Teaching prepositions of time, place and movement, for instance, at different times, will enable learners to build up their knowledge of prepositions slowly and steadily. Doing so will be much more effective than, say, trying to teach every use of 'in' at the same time.
Engage learners in physical movement
The game Simon Says is great for reviewing prepositions of place and movement with young learners, as you can give directions for students to move around, such as ‘Simon Says stand on your chair’ or ‘Simon Says get under your desk.’ Learners respond well to the movement and start using the prepositions naturally.
With adult learners, a competitive timed review game can work really well. Start by dividing the class into teams, say a sentence and then have them take turns drawing it on the board. If you say ‘the dog is behind the chair’, the learners have to draw a corresponding image, which can be graded according to speed or accuracy, depending on which is more enjoyable for the class.
Use visual stimuli
Infographics provide learners with strong images to help visualise the preposition – Picktochart is a great resource for creating these. Bitstrips is a great resource for creating cartoon images, which are universally popular and very easy to comprehend. You can start off by preparing infographics and cartoons for your learners, but an effective way to get them working with the language is to have them prepare infographics themselves. 
Prepositions and postpositions, together called adpositions (or broadly, in English, simply prepositions),^[1] are a class of words used to express spatial or temporal relations (in, under, towards, before) or mark various semantic roles (of, for).^[2]
A preposition or postposition typically combines with a noun or pronoun, or more generally a noun phrase, this being called its complement, or sometimes object. A preposition comes before its complement; a postposition comes after its complement. English generally has prepositions rather than postpositions – words such as in, under and of precede their objects, such as in England, under the table, of Jane – although there are a few exceptions including "ago" and "notwithstanding", as in "three days ago" and "financial limitations notwithstanding". Some languages that use a different word order, have postpositions instead, or have both types. The phrase formed by a preposition or postposition together with its complement is called a prepositional phrase (or postpositional phrase, adpositional phrase, etc.) – such phrases usually play an adverbial role in a sentence.
A less common type of adposition is the circumposition, which consists of two parts that appear on each side of the complement. Other terms sometimes used for particular types of adposition include ambip osition, inposition and interposition. Some linguists use the word preposition in place of adposition regardless of the applicable word order.^[1]
Terminology[edit]
The word preposition comes from Latin: prae ("before") and Latin: ponere ("to put"). This refers to the situation in Latin and Greek (and in English), where such words are placed before their complement (except sometimes in Ancient Greek), and are hence "pre-positioned".
In some languages, including Sindhi, Urdu, Turkish, Hindi, Korean, and Japanese, the same kind of words typically come after their complement. To indicate this, they are called postpositions (using the prefix post-, from Latin post meaning "behind, after"). There are also some cases where the function is performed by two parts coming before and after the complement; this is called a circumposition (from Latin circum "around").
In some languages, for example Finnish, some adpositions can be used as both prepositions and postpositions.
Prepositions, postpositions and circumpositions are collectively known as adpositions (using the Latin prefix ad-, meaning "to"). However, some linguists prefer to use the well-known and longer established term preposition in place of adposition, irrespective of position relative to the complement.^[1]
Grammatical properties[edit]
An adposition typically combines with exactly one complement, most often a noun phrase (or, in a different analysis, a determiner phrase). In English, this is generally a noun (or something functioning as a noun, e.g., a gerund), together with its specifier and modifiers such as articles, adjectives, etc. The complement is sometimes called the object of the adposition. The resulting phrase, formed by the adposition together with its complement, is called an adpositional phrase or prepositional phrase (PP) (or for specificity, a postpositional or circumpositional phrase).
An adposition establishes a grammatical relationship that links its complement to another word or phrase in the context. It also generally establishes a semantic relationship, which may be spatial (in, on, under, ...), temporal (after, during, ...), or of some other type (of, for, via, ...). The World Atlas of Language Structures treats a word as an adposition if it takes a noun phrase as a complement and indicates the grammatical or semantic relationship of that phrase to the verb in the containing clause.^[3]
Some examples of the use of English prepositions are given below. In each case, the prepositional phrase appears in italics, the preposition within it appears in bold, and the preposition's complement is underlined. As demonstrated in some of the examples, more than one prepositional phrase may act as an adjunct to the same word.

• 
  As an adjunct to a noun:
  
  • 
    the weather in March
    
  • 
    cheese from France with live bacteria
    
• 
  As a predicative expression (complement of a copula)
  
  • 
    The key is under the stone.
    
  • 
    The cricketer was given out leg before wicket.
    
• 
  As an adjunct to a verb:
  
  • 
    sleep throughout the winter
    
  • 
    danced atop the tables for hours
    
  • 
    dispense with the formalities (see Semantic functions, below)
    
• 
  As an adjunct to an adjective:
  
  • 
    happy for them
    
  • 
    sick until recently
    

In the last of these examples the complement has the form of an adverb, which has been nominalised to serve as a noun phrase; see Different forms of complement, below. Prepositional phrases themselves are sometimes nominalized:

•