English Prepositions: Free Grammar Course

About this course

Learn a useful foundation for English prepositions in this free BBC Learning English course. The complete five-video series covers the meaning of a preposition and its use for place, time, transport and movement. The introductory recording appears first in the classroom, followed by the four practical topic lessons.

Course at a glance

What you’ll learn

• Explain the basic role of a preposition in a sentence.
• Use examples of place and time to connect grammar with a clear situation.
• Recognize patterns used when talking about transport.
• Describe movement using the relationships shown in the lessons.

Skills you’ll gain

• Prepositions
• Place and position
• Time expressions
• Transport language
• Movement descriptions
• Grammar practice

Course Overview

Prepositions are short words whose meaning depends strongly on the relationship they express. This series makes that relationship visible through four practical contexts. After the introduction, the place lesson focuses attention on position, the time lesson turns to when something happens, and the transport and movement recordings provide further everyday examples. The classroom retains all five source videos while moving the explanation of a preposition to the beginning. This is an introductory course on those published topic areas; it does not claim to cover every idiomatic verb-and-preposition combination in English. A useful study habit is to remember a meaningful phrase or example rather than treating the preposition as an isolated word.

How to study the course

• Start with the introduction and place lesson. Use nearby objects to describe a position, then check whether your words express the relationship you intended.
• Follow the time and transport lessons. Keep examples in short phrases so that the surrounding language helps you remember the pattern.
• Complete the movement lesson and connect place, time and transport in a short description of a journey. Revisit the lesson that explains any uncertain choice.

Use the searchable classroom lesson list to revisit a specific explanation. Pause after a useful demonstration, reproduce a small example and explain the result in your own words. Keep a short note of what worked, what changed and what you still need to understand before moving on.

Who is this for?

This course suits beginners who want a clearer basis for describing everyday situations, as well as returning learners who often hesitate over prepositions. It can support a short grammar revision session alongside broader English study.

Before you start

Basic sentence reading and familiar everyday vocabulary are helpful. Use a notebook and simple invented examples. The videos are free to view, but there is no instructor-marked exercise, full grammar textbook or certified language-level test included.

Put the lessons into practice

Describe an invented journey from home to a library. Include when it starts, which transport you use, where useful objects or places are and how you move between them. Draw a small route or arrange a few objects on a desk to make the relationships clear. Read your description aloud and check each preposition against its intended meaning. Then change the time or route and notice which parts of the language need to change. Keep three corrected phrases that you can adapt to another everyday situation.

This optional activity is provided by WikiFree for independent practice. It is not a graded assignment from the instructor. Keep your working notes, check the result against the task you defined and return to the relevant lesson when an assumption or technique is unclear.

Certificate / Assessment

Watching the public videos and using WikiFree progress tracking does not award a certificate, exam voucher, academic credit or instructor assessment.

Use your practice output to review what you can now explain and repeat independently. Completion tracking records your study progress; it does not replace an assessed qualification or professional experience.

Frequently asked questions

Provider: BBC Learning English. Videos play from the BBC Learning English channel on YouTube.