It is generally known that the importance of the formation of foreign language academic literacy is the most significant component of successful academic communication of a future specialist’s research activities. The IELTS essay is one of the most effective ways to practise foreign language academic literacy. The article explores lexical and grammatical features in academic essays among Russian bilinguals. The purpose of the article is to give practical recommendations to the students in order to avoid and minimize lexical and grammatical errors. The authors have done the research of the linguistic peculiarities of this genre. The article investigates scientists’ views concerning the same issue. The object of the research is English written academic discourse of native speakers, and the subject of the paper is the grammatical and lexical structures of academic essays. The research is also based on an objective analysis: two native English IELTS examiners were invited as experts. They identified lexical and grammatical errors and corrected them. The results showed that the most common mistakes were mistakes in complex grammar constructions (tenses, word order, etc.), cases of redundancy, incorrect use of connecting elements of discourse, violations of stylistic norms, irrelevant sentence variety, incorrect use of vocabulary, improper collocations. The authors have come to a conclusion that systemizing such data enables English language teachers to develop an effective methodology that can be used to overcome most lexical and grammatical mistakes.