Last year I did something that every English teacher promises to do and nobody does: I kept a tally. Every mistake in every essay got a mark. By June I had read 312 essays and counted just over four thousand mistakes.
This is one teacher's count, not a scientific study. But the list was short. Most of those four thousand mistakes were the same twenty, made again and again — and nearly every one was Uzbek quietly translating itself into English.
At the top, far ahead of everything else, were articles: I am student. The life is hard. Uzbek has no articles at all, so the brain does not look for them. Second came the missing -s: She go to school. Uzbek does not mark the third person that way, and under pressure the ending disappears. Third was the present perfect: I live here for ten years, a perfect copy of the Uzbek sentence and a perfect English mistake. Close behind came the missing is (My brother very clever) and uncountable nouns with an -s (informations).
What surprised me was how predictable it all was. The mistakes are not random; they follow the structure of our own language. And anything predictable can be fixed on purpose.
So this year my students run a self-check after every essay. First the articles: every countable singular noun needs a, the or my. Then every he, she and it: does the verb have its -s? Then every for and since. It takes ten minutes, and the marks went up in the first month.
One last confession. In December I found my own university essay from 2009 in a box of old papers. In the first paragraph alone there were two missing articles and one I study English since 2003.
I have framed that page, and it hangs above the whiteboard in my classroom. It proves what I most want my students to know. These mistakes are not a sign that you are bad at English. They are a sign that you speak Uzbek — and they can be unlearned.