ON SOME DIFFICULTIES EXPERIENCED BY THE STUDENTS OF CHEMISTRY FACULTY WHEN WRITING ABSTRACTS OF SCIENTIFIC TEXTS IN ENGLISH

Razumnykh Elena Valeryevna, Bikkulova Gulnara Railevna

the article deals with typical mistakes made by the students of a non-language (more specifically, chemistry) faculty when writing summaries of scientific texts in English. First of all, the difference between an abstract and a summary is outlined and the importance of developing both abstracting and summarizing skills for university students is highlighted. The traditional syntactic structures used for the purposes of writing summaries are described. Then, the examples of students’ mistakes broken down in categories (lexical, grammatical, stylistic or logic-based) are provided. Finally, possible explanations as to the reasons of such mistakes (with a special focus on language interference) are given and the ways to avoid them are mentioned.

Keywords:abstracting, summarizing, semantic compression, lexical choice error, grammatical error, inter-language interference, intra-language interference.