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Damesh Satova teaches English at Nazarbayev Intellectual School, Astana, Kazakhstan.

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‘…In summer of 1999, my mom bought me dress. On the dress were flowers of different colors and it instantly became my favorite. I remember that my father smiled when I first wore it and said me I looked like a flapper from 1920s. My sister liked my dress, too. She is 2 years older than me and likes dresses, skirts a lot. She’s buys at least 3 dresses in a year and never think they are enough. She was angry, because mom not bought her anything this time, only me. Once I went to hairdresser. It was the first time my hair was cut by a professional. After she finished, I ran home to look to the mirror how it looked. When I opened the door, my sister stood in front of the mirror in my dress. I got so angry I started crying and told everything to mom. At home was a big fight. Since then, my sister never took my things without asking…’

This is a type of a text I, as a teacher of English as a second language, receive from my students. The text might be exaggerating the language inaccuracy of one student’s work, but it displays greatly the most common errors that occur in a sample of the language of my students, both oral and written. Helping students acquire English is fun and challenging, and after years of teaching it I could not help but notice that some errors are persistent and particularly popular among students regardless of their language proficiency level. Also, I have come to realize that most of them occur because of the peculiarities of their first language, Russian, although sometimes the errors grow stronger depending how the language is taught. Especially, what topics were covered when and in which sequence. So, here go the most frequent pet errors of my students.

The Top Ten

Click on items in the following list to jump to the explanation.

Articles

Present Simple

The curious incident of verb 'to be'

Constructing negative and interrogative sentences

Present Continuous

Perfect Tense

Construction 'There is/are...' and 'It...'

Phras​al verbs

'Say' in reported speech

'Have + object + past participle'

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Articles.  As a former language learner, articles used to irritate me incredibly. This, unfortunately, does not change when you become a teacher. Neither the concept of the articles nor its function is known in Russian. In Russian, the speaker perfectly gets away by not defining which book Jim is holding or that Lea bought a random book in a random store. As a result, ‘Jim walks into store. Green thick book on the shelf draws his attention. As Jim thought, book is about adventures’.

Why is it hard to understand and use articles? In Russian, the context helps a lot in defining whether the book the speakers are talking about is definite or indefinite. In case of defining particular object, the speaker uses this or that. So the learners do not feel the need to use articles. Also, English articles have many rules and even more exceptions, which is also challenging.

Present Simple  is not as complicated as articles. The only part that might look as a challenge is the ending ‘s’ when the third person is used: ‘My dog bark to all the strangers’, which is again not necessary in Russian.

The curious incident of verb 'to be'.  The first thing I learned as a student and teach my students is that ‘grammatically correct English sentences always have verbs’. On the contrary, almost all statement in English that have ‘to be’ as the main verb can be translated into Russian without any verb. For example,

You might think Russian speakers often omit ‘to be’ in their speech. In fact, they rather use am/is too often. This occurs mainly during unrehearsed speech or a spontaneous text is asked to be produced: 'I am Damesh. I am like dogs. I am wake up at 6am and do exercises. This is Tom. He is sixteen. He is goes to boxing every Monday'.

The only explanation I can offer is that, a) it is hard to accept the function of ‘to be’ in general, b) too little time passes between covering ‘to be’ and ‘present simple’ and the students’ language skills are too poor to differentiate them yet. Having to explain ‘to be’ first and then Present Simple is inevitable, because that is how learners can start building meaningful sentences and get engaged with the language at early stages. Unfortunately, in some cases automatically attaching am to I and is to s/he/it turns into a habit long before student’s skills are good enough to understand the error, so that the mistake can occasionally occur even at a higher proficiency levels, too.

Constructing negative and interrogative sentences.  Russian sentences are turned into negative or interrogative by adding ‘not’ to the verb and shifting the intonation in speech, not by introducing the auxiliary ‘do’. The absence of auxiliary verbs particularly affects students’ speech in natural flow and unrehearsed situations. E. g., ‘ I not work on Saturdays. Work you on Saturdays?’ or ‘I work not on Saturday. You work on Saturdays?’ If these examples are to be translated into Russian, they sound correct, you only emphasize ‘not’ or slightly raise your intonation at the end of the interrogative sentence.

Present Continuous.  Present Continuous tenses have no match in Russian. Let’s explain it with the example of Present Continuous. Russian uses Present Tense for both Present Simple and Continuous, and the speaker will understand depending on the context, the questions asked and time defining words such as now, at the moment, every day and etc. The absence of continuous tense results in two different types of errors: Jim singing in front of the mirror right now (structure wise). I wrote to my grandmother, when the phone rang (confusion of simple vs. continuous).

Fun fact: The students with Russian background learn Past Continuous better and do not confuse it as often as the Present Continuous.

Perfect Tense  is another big challenge. Russian language uses Present Simple/Past Simple for the same purposes that English uses Present Perfect. So, here come a few examples of the mistakes that occur:

Construction 'There is/are...' and 'It...'.  Usually, these constructions are covered at the early stages of learning English and then are not repeated later. At the moment when these structures are covered, students grasp the meaning of saying 'There is a picture on the wall' (when describing their room) and 'It is hot today' (when learning time and weather) easily. However, they become one of the most popular errors of the students, who are able to make up a speech for 3-4 minutes, write a few paragraphs and layout their messages, especially when describing an event or telling a story. E. g., 'I opened the door to a very big room. Were 50 people in it.’ , 'The sun has not showed up for 3 days now. Andy looked at the window, was raining.’

There are a few reasons why this occurs. The Russian language has a sentence type called 'no subject (impersonal) sentences' that are used exactly for the same purposes and the examples given above make sense when translated into Russian word for word. The second reason lies with the curriculum students are following. Having to learn there is/there are/it is in the first months of learning English and succeeding in them at that period (which is always the case) establishes a wrong vision as if the construction is tamed and now the learner can move on. And let's agree the topics such as describing your room or telling the time are rarely used again up until the time when the learner starts incorporating several topics into one story, thus before there is/there are/it is activated again, it is safely stored in a remote part of the brain under layers of dust and information.

Phrasal verbs.  The only way to master phrasal verbs is, to students’ great disappointment, to learn them for countless hours and use them in their speech. The most popular verbs students struggle with are 'look at me' and 'wait for me'. In Russian, saying ‘I looked at a picture’, if translated word for word, would mean ‘I looked to (sometimes for) a picture’. Whereas, the English version of ‘Elsa waited for Anna’ would not use any preposition at all in Russian. So, instead of ‘I sat there looking at the stangers in the park, while waiting for Pete’ the learner can say ‘I sat there looking to the strangers in the park, while waiting Pete’.

'Say' in reported speech.  In Russian, the verbs 'say' and 'tell' in reported speech need no preposition afterwards. This is why saying 'Peter said me he was busy' is one of the most popular errors, too.

'Have + object + past participle'.  As a speaker of English as a foreign language, I had to take such language proficiency tests as TOEFL and IELTS several times. The mark scheme for writing part of both tests is a big deal. Every test taker probably goes through it and polishes up complicated patterns such as 'have something done' hoping it will raise his or her score. If not for those tests, Russian speaking students would see little point in learning them, because, honestly, you can speak English and completely make sense to others by replacing it with the Passive Voice. Errors occurring in students' use of language are small, but only because they avoid using it. Also, the difference they see between 'I had my hair cut' and 'I've cut my hair' is very subtle and they both describe an action that has just occurred. At least, that is how my students justify their language choice when asked.

Dealing with the errors

These, I think, are the most frequently met errors that I have encountered in all my teaching experience. One of the interesting part of working on those errors is that the learners are aware of what occurs in their language most, however find it difficult to cope with it. They can fix them when repeatedly looking at their own papers and using a checklist or a markscheme, but it grows complicated when it comes to producing a spontaneous speech, both orally or in written form. So far, the top techniques in the class, that I use and find helpful, are the following:

1. Before students settle to prepare a speech or written text, provide them with the list of most common errors and the reminder of how they actually work.
2. After the completion of their work, return students’ final product to them or peers without any correction but the names of language aspects to check.
3. This is time consuming, yet might be an effective way: to give back to students last 2-3 works they have done and let them analyze for their top favorite 5 mistakes.
4. Have a chart or a card that explains the basic grammar rules, most essential and most basic.
5. Discuss in class some examples of most frequent errors, what they were meant to say, what they actually say and vote whether the error interferes with the author’s message or not.