Keyword: «pre-service language teachers’ training»

The topicality of the article stems from the fact that the sphere of error analysis has not always been regarded as a priority in the field of language teaching, and, therefore, it has failed to receive all the attention that it deserves. The same can be said about lexical inaccuracies in the professional training of pre-service language teachers. Thus, the main aim of the article is to examine and analyze the most frequent errors in the written pedagogical speech of prospective English language teachers. Students of Lomonosov Moscow State University and Herzen State Pedagogical university completed a CELTA-style assignment designed to demonstrate their analytical, pedagogical, and professional language skills. As far as methods and materials are concerned, 78 students’ written contributions were analyzed and assessed both by a specialist in the field of ELT and two AI tools (DeepSeek and ChatGPT). The research findings led to a classification of the most frequent errors. As a result of the analysis made, several types of professionally oriented lexical errors were singled out. The latter were divided into two main categories: professional language use (lexical errors caused by a knowledge gap and the discrepancy between two different terminological systems) and teaching methods (inadequate solutions applied to the given pedagogical problems). In addition, there are several implications regarding the weaknesses of generative AI (specifically, the aforementioned neural networks). The practical findings of the study prove that greater efforts should be concentrated on developing professionally oriented lexical competence concerning the process of training pre-service language teachers. Moreover, it is argued that the use of AI technologies for evaluating students’ written assignments should be handled with extra caution and care on the part of language instructors. The theoretical significance of the study deals with the reconsideration of developing language skills in the sphere of professionally oriented vocabulary while training future language teachers. The practical significance lies in the possibility of using the results described in the article as a means of preventing errors that future language teachers are often prone to make, as well as a source of information that can be used for educational materials and course design to ensure the ongoing development of professional communicative competence of the target audience.