Writing in a foreign language is widely recognized as a highly challenging skill to master. This perspective is grounded in the notion that writing reflects our ‘pattern of thought’ (Kaplan 1966, Connor 2011), and that there are multiple academic traditions of writing, each with its own rules and conventions. As a result, transitioning between different academic writing cultures can be a frustrating and confusing experience for both students and lecturers. This paper investigates the most prevalent challenges in teaching academic English to EFL students at the English Department of the Faculty of Philosophy, University of Sarajevo. The research findings indicate that EFL students lack critical thinking skills and tend to undervalue their own perspectives, leading to an overreliance on quoting and citing authors in their writing. This paper emphasizes the necessity for EAP lecturers to be well-versed in intercultural rhetoric and to effectively guide students in adapting their thinking and writing to a new academic culture./ Keywords: Academic English, intercultural rhetoric, critical thinking, writing

Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) has been involved in the process of European integration for many years with the goal of obtaining full EU membership. This paper seeks to answer whether the process of European integration has resulted in launching specialised EU study programmes in translation, interpretation, terminology, language&law at the university level in BiH. For the purpose of this paper, curricula of eight English Departments (academic year 2021/2022) were examined: Sarajevo, Mostar (Univerzitet “Džemal Bijedić”/”Sveučilište u Mostaru”), Tuzla, Zenica, Bihać, Banja Luka, Istočno Novo Sarajevo. Private universities were disregarded. The analysis findings revealed that the departments mentioned do not offer any specialised programmes of this kind, as well as that, becoming a “lawyer-linguist” and/or a “terminologist” is not possible via the regular education system. It has been concluded that BiH universities should start promoting the importance of such study programmes as soon as possible and that academia should start opening up towards the creation of new interdisciplinary study programmes thus strengthening the language capacity of individuals willing to specialise in this field, as well as the attractiveness of higher education in BiH.

The paper deals with the problem of poor acquisition of English nominal compounds in EFL university students who are native speakers of Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian (BCS). The problem was tackled by a brief comparison of noun morphology and declension suffixes in English and BCS, the introduction of negative transfer in the process of foreign language acquisition, and the analysis of BCS translation equivalents. The discussion revealed that the productivity of compounding largely depends on the complexity of noun morphology. Put simply, the more complex noun morphology is, the less productive compounding will be. In addition, the analysis of the translation equivalents also highlighted that a vast majority of problems related to poor acquisition of English nominal compounds stems from the fact that EFL learners usually translate L1 phrases word-forword into L2. Finally, it was pointed out that teaching English nominal compounds to EFL learners could be improved by tailored-made instructions provided in L1.

In the present paper, the authors analyse attitudes of students (N=91) studying at the Department of English Language and Literature toward distance learning launched at the Faculty of Philosophy, University of Sarajevo, during the COVID-19 pandemic in March 2020. The study is designed as action research containing elements of both qualitative and quantitative research. The key instrument for collecting data was a survey designed by the authors of the present paper. The Google Forms survey was delivered to 1st-5th year students at the Department of English Language and Literature by e-mail. The collected data were processed by means of SPSS software (descriptive statistics). Results of the analysis show that students do not consider “distance learning’’ to be of better quality when compared to “learning in the classroom’’ but also that students, in the period of returning to a “new normal’’, openly express their preference for blended learning. At the same time, results of the analysis reveal that it is necessary to modernise teaching practices by means of introducing a more representative version of the distance learning system that would not only significantly improve the quality of the teaching practices, but also assist in maintaining competitiveness of the Faculty of Philosophy as a higher education institution.