An essential guide for all students studying for a Master’s degree in social work, whether they have come directly from their undergraduate studies or after a period of employment. This book focuses specifically on the skills needed to study social work at Master’s level, helping students get to grips with the academic rigour required at this higher level of study. This includes research skills, writing style, tone, the emphasis on self-reflection and the need to communicate in both academic and professional contexts. Pedagogical features and activities provide opportunities to explore, analyse and reflect on what has been learnt. The book will help cultivate a social practice approach to writing, raise awareness of the choices available, and aid understanding so that readers can produce the types of discourse required at Master’s level in social work.

A one-stop guide for social work students that offers extensive study support and skills development.

In this comprehensive guide, we cover four key areas all tailored specifically for social work:

Studying for your Social Work DegreeAcademic Writing and ReferencingCommunication Skills, andCritical Thinking Skills. The compendium includes up to date coverage of all the relevant study skills required to succeed in a social work degree - including:

the structure and culture of a social work degree,adopting a reflective and critical approach, andhow to find your academic 'voice'.This book is also packed with tasks and numerous examples to aid student understanding, so learners can feel confident that they are fully equipped with all they need to maximise their potential.

An essential guide for all students studying for a Master's degree in social work, whether they have come directly from their undergraduate studies or after a period of employment. 

This book focuses specifically on the skills needed to study social work at Master's level, helping students get to grips with the academic rigour required at this higher level of study. This includes research skills, writing style, tone, the emphasis on self-reflection and the need to communicate in both academic and professional contexts. Pedagogical features and activities provide opportunities to explore, analyse and reflect on what has been learnt. The book will help cultivate a social practice approach to writing, raise awareness of the choices available, and aid understanding so that readers can produce the types of discourse required at Master’s level in social work. 

LSP teachers working at KTH Royal Institute of Technology have created a guide to scientific writing in English. This is an online resource that aims to raise awareness of what constitutes effective scientific writing.

The guide emerged from interactions between LSP teachers and their students and faculty colleagues on the nature of effective scientific writing in English. As a result, and in contrast to many other university writing guides, the KTH guide is rooted in the typical writing genres and conventions of a technical university, and draws on examples of these to explore sentence structure, punctuation, text flow, and scientific style. 

Since its launch, the guide has become an integral part of classroom practice, and it has drawn a number of comments from students and faculty colleagues in anonymized surveys and course evaluations. Our analysis of these comments suggests that users appreciate the focus on scientific writing (as opposed to more general academic writing), but that some struggle to find answers to specific questions. 

In this paper, we introduce the guide, present a thematic analysis of the evaluations, and discuss the impact of these on the development of not only the guide, but also on scientific writing practices at KTH.

Since the launch of ChatGPT in November 2022, there has been intense debate about the impact of AI on teaching and learning in universities (Alkaissi and McFarlane, 2023, Curtis, 2023; Jurgen et al., 2023; Liebrenz et al., 2023; Lund and Wang, 2023). Reactions range from concern, particularly around written assessments and the risk of plagiarism, to acceptance of a new reality, and to excitement at the potential of AI to facilitate and enhance learning. In many ways, the issue is not a new one. There have long been tools available to students who seek help with their writing. Most students will at some point use Grammarly, or tools in Word/Google Docs/Overleaf/LaTeX, to check grammar, word choice or spelling. This is in addition to more traditional dictionary and thesaurus use, as well as recourse to translation apps. One thing is clear: as teachers, we need to be talking openly with our students about the nature and role of these apps in education. Our project is a step in this direction. Our aim is to promote a critical and ethical approach to the use of all writing aids among students, including ChatGPT, through a process of dialogue and relection. In this session, we outline this process and present our data analysis based on the work of students in two technical universities: KTH in Sweden and Kauno Technical University in Lithuania. 

The recently launched KTH Guide to scientific writing in English emerged from the many discussions between teachers in Language and Communication and the wider KTH scientific writing community - students, lecturers and researchers - on the nature of effective scientific writing. As a result of these origins, the Guide is rooted in typical writing genres at KTH, and it draws on examples of these to provide guidance on the areas of sentence structure, punctuation, text flow and scientific style. Much of the focus in the Guide is on helping writers to make more informed choices, rather than simply follow rules. We hope to encourage them to explore their own preferences, and thus develop their own individual academic voice.

The KTH Guide to scientific writing was created with the aim of supporting students and faculty with scientific writing in English. The guide is rooted in the typical writing genres of a technical university, and draws on examples of these to explore sentence structure, punctuation, text flow, and scientific style. Since its launch, the guide has become an integral part of classroom practice in the department of Language and Communication, and an online resource for all students and faculty at KTH. This paper presents our findings from the first stage of our evaluation of the guide. The evaluation consists of a short reflective questionnaire for users. We have begun to collect responses to the questions, and to conduct an inductive thematic analysis (ITA) to identify emerging themes. 

Academic writing for international students is designed to help science and technology students at university to improve their academic English and develop the knowledge, skills, tools and strategies needed to produce clear, coherent writing in assignments. The book is designed to be easy to read and use, to be a clear and accessible companion for the busy student. 

Key areas covered are:

·       Writing in the sciences

·       Writing at university

·       Scientific style

·       Sentence structure

·       Paragraph development

·       Referring to sources

·       Developing coherent texts and arguments

·       The conventions of scientific writing

The approach in the book is based on a simple notion of noticing two very important things:

·       what writers do in texts

·       what language and discourse features they use to do it 

The book uses authentic texts to explore that nature of scientific writing, focusing on important features of language and discourse. These Explorative Tasks allow you to see how language works in a real scientific context. There are also Practice Tasks and Review Tasks to consolidate learning and help you to build your own writing skills. This new edition introduces Reflective Tasks to encourage you to think about your own knowledge and experience, and bring this to bear on your writing journey at university.

New in the second edition:

·       Two new chapters: 

o   Writing in the sciences

o   Writing at university

·       New Reflective Tasks

·       New content and additional tasks throughout the book

·       Additional authentic examples of scientific writing