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

• Main Author: O. L. Dobrynina (Author)
• Format: Book
• Published: Moscow Polytechnic University, 2018-12-01T00:00:00Z.
• Subjects: article
• Online Access: Connect to this object online.
• Notes: 0869-3617; 2072-0459; 10.31992/0869-3617-2018-27-10-75-83
• Keywords: english as a foreign language; lexical interference; multiple meaning; synonymy; con¬textual meaning; cross-lingual matching; Education; L
• Source: Высшее образование в России, Vol 27, Iss 10, Pp 75-83 (2018)

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.