Ideas in action: some reflections concerning teaching language skills to social work students

Abstract

In recent years, there has been a decline in language skills among the younger population in Sweden. Within several different academic programs, it has been observed that students arriving at the universities do not have the skills needed to make use of what is taught. This raises a number of problems, especially within social work education, because language skills, both written and oral, are important tools for practicing social work. This article presents a way of meeting this challenge and improving the students' skills by including them in discussions on how to write academically as part of teaching method called language guidance. The students reflect upon their own and other students' texts, and discuss how they can be improved with regard to spelling, grammar, paragraphing, and clarity. Overall, the resources devoted to improving students' language skills have resulted in improvements in the essays the student write later on in their education.

Exploring Cohesions in EFL Academic Writing: A State of the Art on the Study of Cohesions

“…Other difficulties that writers face while academic writing include (a) linguistic difficulty (grammar, vocabulary, language use), (b) linguistic difficulty (grammar, vocabulary, language use), (c) linguistic difficulty (grammar, vocabulary, language use), (d) linguistic difficulty (grammar, vocabulary, language use), (d) linguistic (b) difficulty with physiology (no contact between writer and reader), and (c) problems of the mind (punctuation, capitalization, and paragraphing). Some authors are labeled as "bad" because their language skills (Dollmann & Rudolphi, 2020;Thunberg, 2019) should be sharpened as soon as they arrive at universities; they lack the ability to apply what they have learned. The nature of the overall classroom background influences students' language skills, and the composition of friendship networks within school classes is worth considering.…”