Common speech mistakes in schoolchildren’s final essays

Abstract

It is particularly important to analyse the typical mistakes schoolchildren make in their final essays. This work enables us to identify the gaps in learners’ knowledge resulting in inaccurate expression of thought, violation of logic, and stylistic dissonance. The article considers various typologies of errors obtained from schoolchildren’s essays. We have identified the most common grammatical, lexical, and stylistic errors. The first group includes an incorrect use of aspectual-temporal forms of the verb, participial and adverbial participial phrases, errors in sentences with homogeneous parts, and other issues. Lexically, students tend to choose incorrect words, violate lexical combinability and so on. Stylistic mistakes involve unnecessary use of low colloquial and colloquial vocabulary, literary vocabulary, including officialese, an improper use of figurative and expressive means, and other issues. The paper concludes that schoolchildren’s essays aim to be as literary as possible. Learners use standard constructions, "tried-and-tested" in many works.