Academic Literacy: The Analysis of First-Year Ukrainian University Students' Errors in Essay Writing

Ukrainian undergraduate students face challenges in demonstrating high-level proficiency in most of their academic writing. As an integral part of academic achievement, writing skills are essential for success at the various levels of students' future career paths. Thus, academic literacy has raised considerable attention to teaching English as a second language. This study explores the writing competence level of 90 first-year students of Computer Science and Cybernetics Faculty at Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv and analyzes essay errors that are identified, classified and explained. The study describes the main categories of errors and reveals the causes of their production. It is evaluated that the major types of errors committed in students' writing are: word choice, word spelling, verb tense, articles, and prepositions. We consider that the main reasons for errors are the native language interference, the lack of English academic writing knowledge and insufficient English grammar, and functional use practice. Focusing on the importance of encouraging students to develop their academic literacy, we defined the approaches and strategies that can help teachers and language learners to overcome difficulties in writing. After defining the essay errors, the students were given a set of tips on academic writing proficiency and presented with contrastive L1-L2 comparisons, which resulted in significant improvement of the required academic writing skills. Finally, we measured the impact value of error difference aimed at describing the relationships between pre-analysis and post-analysis writing. Learning academic writing literacy may be an appropriate way to arise overall disciplinary literacy with the students.