Problems of Academic Writing: Lexical Errors, their Causes and Correction Strategies

Abstract

Lexical errors in students’ English writing may be caused by lexical interference, mul­tiple meaning and synonymy of Russian and English words. Russian students studying English as a foreign language often have little notion of the English or Russian word connotation and cannot analyze the word meaning; consequently they make a lot of lexical errors in translating their ideas into English. Typical students’ errors and mistakes include usage of a direct word meaning instead of a figurative one, transfer of the given word collocation into all possible collocations of this word, errors in selecting the contextual meaning of a multiple meaning word. We use some methods in teaching students to analyze the contextual meaning of the word and to find the English word for adequate translation: explanation of some problematic situations, cross-lingual matching and trans­lation comparison. As a result students gain metacognitive skills to classify the obtained information and to organize it into linked structures, to analyze the contextual word meaning, to overcome vo­cabulary disparity and word sense disambiguation.