Technology of lifelong linguistic education: teaching students to recoginize and correct errors in English academic writing

Lifelong language learning means learning foreign languages during person’s life both within an education system and outside it. The article focuses on the effect of interference and polysemy on academic English of students from some countries. Students’ native language (Finnish, Swedish, German, Italian, Arabic, Chinese, and Russian) is given a brief characteristic in comparison with English as a foreign language. The author considers the influence of students’ native language on their errors in academic writing. Teachers of academic English from the mentioned countries show that students face problems when dealing with the structure of the English sentence and its word order, with tense system and active and passive voices, with articles and prepositions usage. Examples of such errors are presented and some suggestions for their correction are given. Polysemy of the native and English languages presents a lot of difficulties for learners while choosing the proper word meaning. Students should learn to analyze the context meaning of words in their native language and to find its relevant equivalent in English. Teachers could explain such problem situations to students, use interlanguage contrasting exercises and train students to recode their ideas from their native language into English.