Errors in Russian written speech of native speakers of a foreign language studying in Moscow Region schools

Many children who are native speakers of foreign languages study in Moscow Oblast schools. Russian is a foreign language for them. The major difficulty such students face is written speech in Russian. This study aims to identify errors in their written speech and to analyse the obtained results. The respondents were the P class students in the 4th year of Domodedovo Secondary School No. 12 named after V. D. Presnov. They represented the near abroad, as well as Bashkortostan and Dagestan. The material for the study was the schoolchildren’s written works (essays and expositions) produced at the end of the 2022/2023 academic year. The papers were analysed and quantitatively processed. The research results indicate that the most frequent errors in the written speech of native speakers of foreign languages are spelling, punctuation, and phonetic-graphic mistakes. The reasons for the specified errors include the lack of reading skills in Russian and language transfer. Lexical and grammatical mistakes tend to decrease since early education of children in the multicultural environment of the Russian primary school enables error minimisation. It has been proved that a special role is performed by teachers who have certain teaching experience and are familiar with the methodology basics of teaching Russian as a foreign language.