Some difficulties facing native speakers of Czech and Slovak in writing in English
| Authors | |
|---|---|
| Year of publication | 2005 |
| Type | Article in Proceedings |
| Conference | Theory and Practice in English Studies 3 |
| MU Faculty or unit | |
| Citation | |
| Field | Linguistics |
| Keywords | academic writing; text organization; lexico-grammatical structure; coherence; English; Czech; Slovak |
| Description | The paper presents an analysis of errors occurring in English essays written by Czech and Slovak university students. It distinguishes five major error types, i.e. grammatical, lexical, lexico-grammatical, text-coherence, and formal errors. The study relates the occurrence of certain error types to the linguistic and cultural background of the author of the text, and looks for possibilities of developing writing skills within academic writing courses. The paper suggests that the courses focus on text-coherence, a phenomenon which has a high priority in Anglo-American written discourse and which is not specifically addressed by any other courses in Czech and Slovak university curricula. The paper outlines some successful strategies of writing coherent and effective texts. |
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