The Forefront Achieving Academic Success 1

The first book of the series, The Forefront, Achieving Academic Success 1, is aimed to meet the academic needs of students in their freshman year in English-medium universities. The book follows an integrated skills approach aiming to give students practice in the basics of reading, listening, speaking, and writing for academic purposes. Thematic reading and listening materials, which follow the theme cities, are used as input for the productive skills, speaking and especially writing, which are the two skills that the book mainly targets.

The activities in the book start from basic comprehension level and ultimately aim to develop higher order skills. Students analyze, evaluate, and synthesize the information they find in different materials, react to them, and finally create their own piece of writing by using these as reference materials.

Another aim of the book is to familiarize students with the world of academia in their first year of academic studies and help them adopt academic conventions when speaking and writing, which will prove useful throughout their academic life. To this end, extensive writing input has been included in the book, providing instructional scaffolding so that students can master the sub-skills and accomplish more autonomous and extended writing tasks.

The writing input avoids overgeneralized advice and provides detailed explanations by considering different fields of study where different rules may apply. It also appreciates disciplinary differences in writing styles, giving advice informed by linguistic findings.

We hope that the book provides guidance for both the teachers and the students when trying to find their way in the complex maze of the academic world.