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.

Teaching English as a foreign language at university level is quite a different challenge compared to teaching high school or young non-native learners. This is due to the fact that university students are expected to acquire specific grammar terminology in order to master the grammar system of the target language. At the English Department of the Faculty of Philosophy in Sarajevo, during the first three (undergraduate) years of study the students are introduced to several grammar courses, focusing on the analysis of English grammar through descriptive explanations given in English. The courses serve as a basis which is expected to improve both grammar and translation competence of the students. This paper examines to what extent the acquired descriptive knowledge of morphosyntactic properties of English is helpful in terms of translation of those Bosnian sentences whose proper translation into English requires the knowledge of contrastive rules. The research has been designed as a combination of action research and a quasi-experimental pre-test (delayed) post-test control-treatment group. As the research findings have revealed, teaching grammar to non-native learners of English without input as to the contrastive differences between the source and the target language results in erroneous translation, which is a consequence of negative transfer from the source into the target language. On the other hand, grammar teaching supported by the presentation of relevant contrastive rules has proved to be an efficient learning technique in terms of reducing errors and improving both grammar and translation competence of non-native learners. Keywords: verb phrase, erroneous translation, transfer, contrastive analysis, pretesting, post-testing, treatment

Legal English is known as a complex language system characterized by the use of formal terminology, complex syntax and a complicated style of writing. However, over the last 40 years legal English has been undergoing reforms which were initiated by the proponents of the Plain English Campaign. The main goal of this movement has been to simplify legal language, in particular the language of legal acts, for the purpose of making it equally comprehensible to both legal experts and ordinary citizens. This paper gives a brief overview of the most significant reforms that have taken place in the sphere of verb phrase focusing on the „deletion“ of the modal shall and the reduction of passive sentences, which are nowadays considered widely recognized rules in the drafting of not only British but also legal acts of all the English-speaking jurisdictions. Keywords: Plain English Campaign, verb phrase, legal acts, reform, shall, passive voice

This paper discusses the use of corpus linguistics sources, in particular, the Collins Worldbanks Online Corpus in terms of its characteristics and possibilities for linguistic analyses, which may significantly improve the process of teaching English as a second language at the university level. This Corpus contains 57 million words of written and spoken English, from both American and British sources. It is worth mentioning that, according to our knowledge, the corpus linguistics databases such as the British National Corpus, the Brown Corpus or the Collins Worldbanks Online Corpus, etc. are not available at the faculties in Bosnia-Herzegovina. Therefore, the main goal of this paper is to give a detailed overview of the structure and the basic terminology of the Collins Worldbanks Online Corpus such as query, concordance, sketch-diff etc. with special reference to a practical use of this corpus in a teaching process in terms of studying vocabulary and collocations (e.g. a proper word usage of the nouns man vs. male, or the verbs request vs. require), thus drawing attention to the importance of this significant linguistic tool which, hopefully, will be recognized as such and will be available all across the faculties in Bosnia-Herzegovina in near future.