The Future of Education

In Sweden, there is a growing proportion of students with swedish as a second language. Second language students struggle with the formal features of academic texts. Many swedish universities provide academic resource centers where students are offered academic text tutoring. These resource centers are frequently visited by second language students.

Sociocultural theory stresses the importance of socialization in learning development. Within this frameword, learning is accomplished through practice and interaction. In recent years there has been an increased focus on explicit instruction of linguistic features of texts. Numerous theories account for how to give explicit textual feedback. Very little research has investaged the effects of textual tutoring on university level.

The present study contributes to the understanding of second language writing at university level and the effects of text tutoring. Second language texts in academic genres are gathered before and after text tutoring. The texts are analyzed according to their structural properties, i.e. sentence connectors, word order, negation and nominal phrases. A comparison is made between the text written before and the text written after text tutoring. This research will provide insights concerning the effects of text tutoring on different structureal properties of academic texts.