Mariia Pukhka

Scientific Advisor –

Candidate of sciences

Solov’yova O. V.

STUDENTS’ TYPICAL ERRORS IN ESL WRITTEN DISCOURSE

Topicality: Writing in English can be a challenging task for students who learn English as a second language. Some ESL students' social and cultural background prevents them from writing about subjects they consider taboo, like politics or religion. Students may also experience difficulties with form, morphology, vocabulary and syntax that are different in English and their native language.

The present paper describes possible problems in teaching ESL writing and the ways of their solution.

Historiography: The problem of teaching writing to ESL students has been studied by such scientists as Ye. Kazarova, G. Krivchikova, L. Mazunova, S. Nikolayeva, A. Boyko, T. Hedge et alta. However, writing still remains the least developed among the basic foreign language skills. This gives us grounds to assert the novelty of this topic.

The Object is teaching writing to ESL students.

The aim of the work is to study the main peculiarities of teaching written discourse skills to ESL students.

According to the aim, the investigation poses and fulfills the following objectives:

1. To describe the formation of written discourse skills.

2. To study the main components of writing proficiency.

3. To investigate the grammatical, strategic, sociolinguistic and discourse competences.

4. To analyze the possible problems of teaching writing and the ways of their solution.

5. To describe the main strategies for teaching writing.

6. To develop some tasks for teaching specific forms of writing in English.

The purpose of the research is to study the possible problems in teaching writing and find the ways of their solution.

Writing plays an important role in the life of every person. It is used in different spheres of people’s activity. Thus, it should be taught from early stages of language learning. If speaking is a means of communication with the help of sounds, writing is a means of communication with the help of graphical sounds. Writing can be one of the most difficult aspects of ESL teaching. Because of the complexities of writing, many teachers simply avoid the area, instead concentrating on reading and pronunciation. Writing is, however, essential to ESL students, especially those at higher levels, and while it may be hard to get started teaching it, the rewards are more than worth it. [3,147]

To assist students in gaining more confidence in writing, teachers should let students understand their actual level of English. Reassurance and motivation are also of great importance.

Teaching Writing is a complex and timely process. There are different writing activities for beginning, intermediate, advanced, and transitional levels. Among the beginning level activities are copying with understanding, sentence completions, dictations, experience charts, everyday communications, situational dialogues (rejoinders), development of original sentences, sentence combinations, sentence expansion, summaries, controlled compositions, and guided compositions. Among the intermediate level activities are summaries, ordering of statements, completion of forms, friendly letters, outlining, creative or recreational writing, and reactions. Advanced level activities include expansion of previous writing assignments, book reports, business letters, letters of complaint, reporting, and thematic compositions. Transitional level activities include continuation of letter writing, persuasive composition, expository compositions, and cloze practice.

Teaching writing to students of a foreign language department should include practice in producing formal and informal letters, resumes, cover letters, letters of recommendation and different types of essays.

This article deals with the typical errors we have found in the works by first-year and second-year students of the College of Modern European Languages at Yuri Fedkovych Chernivtsi National University. Specific forms of writing (formal, informal, and essay writing) are also analyzed here.

We have analyzed samples of written work done by first-year and second-year students of the Department of Modern Foreign Languages at Yuri Fedkovych Chernivtsi National University. We have grouped into several categories the most common mistakes we have observed in the works.

1. Nouns

o Omission of the -s plural (two university)

o Pluralizing non-countable nouns (homeworks)

o Using indefinite article a(n) with a non-countable noun (a flour, a wine is good to drink)

o Failing to make nouns and noun determiners agree (this doctors, seven page)

2. Verbs

o Omission of 3rd person singular "s" (he walk)

o Omission of the "ed" of the simple past tense (Yesterday he play ball)

o Omission of the "ed" in formation of passive voice (The scientists were honor for their work)

o Use of intransitive verbs in passive forms (The earthquake was occurred last Friday) - verbs such as occur, happen, sleep, die, and fall often cause problems because they seem to have passive meanings even though they are intransitive.

o Misuse of progressive verb forms (I am reading the paper every day, What are you wanting?) - it can help to emphasize that certain verbs expressing a state of being or mental activity are generally not used in the progressive sense. Examples include appear, believe, have, hear, know, like, need, see, seem, taste, think, understand, and want.

o Misuse of perfect forms - while English uses present perfect to describe an action that began in the past and continues to the present, as in "I have been here for six months now," other languages would just say "I am here six months now." Other students may omit the -ed ending on the past participle: Many churches have offer shelter to the homeless.

o Misuse of modal auxiliaries - Out of the twenty-three English helping verbs, nine, called modals, can only work as helping verbs. These are can, could, may, might, must, shall, should, will, and would; verbs that can be either helping or main verbs are forms of do, have, and be. Some students may have trouble coordinating helping and main verbs, but it can help to tell students that modal auxiliaries do not agree in number with the subject (He cans do it) and that modals are followed by base, not finite verb forms (He can does it).[7,163]

3. Preposition Errors

o Preposition meanings are highly idiosyncratic from language to language - (I prefer to live in home, at the day of her arrival)

4. Articles

o Failing to use a(an) with singular countable nouns whose specific identity is unknown to the reader (Mary Beth arrived in limousine)

o Using a(an) with non-countable nouns (a sugar, a furniture, a patience) Commonly used uncountable nouns include words for food and drink (bacon, beef, candy, milk, pasta); nonfood substances (air, water, coal, snow); abstract nouns (advice, anger, intelligence, fun); and others (biology, clothing, luggage, homework, furniture, money, news, work)

o Failing to use the with nouns whose specific identity is known to the reader (Gun on top shelf was loaded, Don't slam door when you leave)

o Using the with plural or uncountable nouns meaning "all" or "general" (In some parts of the world, the rice is preferred to other grains.)

o Using an article with proper nouns (the South America, the Lake Geneva) - this can be confusing because some proper nouns do take an article (the Mississippi River, the Sahara Desert). The best strategy is to check the dictionary, an atlas, or an encyclopedia when in doubt.

5. Adverb Clauses

o Misconstructing adverb clauses by using two conjunctions.

This list of mistakes is not comprehensive, but it touches on some of the major errors we have found in the students’ papers.

Thus, students for whom English is a second language (ESL) have a keen understanding of how languages work. However, they have different skills and needs than native speakers of English. Because they have to deal with competing cultural expectations and competing languages, ESL students can have special difficulties seeing problems with their writing and solving them.

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