Abstract:

Students’ability to correctly and fluently express their thoughts using the means of a foreign language can be called as one of the main goals of foreign language teaching. Nevertheless, while studying a new foreign language it is natural for L2 learners to makes speech errors which may create a language barrier resulting in a communicative failure.

Speech errors have been more recently a source of serious study in such fields as psychology, linguistics, correctional pedagogy and language teaching methods. They can be categorized according to the linguistic units involved in the error (i.e. at the phonological feature, phoneme, syllable, morpheme, word, phrase, or sentence levels) and the error mechanism involved (i.e. blend, substitution, addition, or deletion of units.) For example, an individual tends to say irregural verb instead of irregular verb. [1]

Early estimates suggested upwards of 10 000 different speech errors are committed in the English language. [2] Therefore, the purpose of this research is to analyze the basic lexical, grammatical and spelling mistakes made by university students who are native speakers of the Russian language, learning English, to create a system of exercises aimed at further elimination of students’ language errors.

A special English language test was developed for this reason and a survey was conducted to interview 56 junior and senior university students aged 19-25 studying English as a foreign language at Russian universities (RUDN university, Moscow State Pedagogical University, Russian State University for the Humanities, National University of Oil and Gas "Gubkin University", Moscow Financial and Industrial University “Synergy”, Moscow State Regional University).

The findings of the research managed to discover the most difficult language issues which students face in their L2 learning process. Error correction recommendations were developed and introduced to help English language teachers as well as their learners to reduce or eliminate the number of mistakes when producing a foreign language speech.

References:
[1] Sukma Sukriana, A study of speech error uttered by Zaynmalik during interview with Zane Lowe, 2017. Retrieved from www.academia.edu/31672391/a_study_of_speech_error_uttered_by_zayn_malik_during_interview_with_zane_lowe_thesis_proposal_english_department_faculty_of_language_and_art_universitas_negeri_padang_2017.
[2] Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, Accessed 14 July, 2019. Retrieved from https://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/Psycholinguistics/Speech_Errors#cite_note-Meringer1895-2.

Keywords:

Speech errors, the English language, university students, lexical, grammatical and spelling mistakes, error correction.