Table 1 Course contents and academic skills

• Acquiring widely-used academic words

• Analyzing sentence members

• Identifying topic sentences

• Summarizing

• Acquiring widely-used collocations

• Analyzing complex sentences

• Identifying structure

• Paraphrasing

• Using logical connectors properly

• Understanding the use of active and passive voices

• Making inferences

• Inserting in-text citations

• Using phrases properly

• Sentence structures

• Analyzing the logic between sentences

• Synthesizing sources

• Identifying reporting verbs

• Using Verb tenses correctly

• Identifying research gaps

• Using cohesive devices

• Understanding cohesive devices

• Using Nominalization

• Guessing the general meaning of unfamiliar words

• Using hedges

• Evaluating previous studies