The present study investigates the impact of introducing two academic courses on the quality of Master’s students’ writing. The initial course was designed to equip students enrolled in Bachelor’s programmes with the fundamental principles of academic writing and presentation skills. This course was conceived to provide students with a solid foundation in these areas, supplemented by ample opportunities for practical engagement with the English language. The second course on English for academic and specific purposes was offered within two semesters with the aim of deepening theoretical knowledge through practical tasks.

The introduction of these courses was meticulously planned and designed by the teaching staff, who recognised deficiencies in the theses submitted by students from previous years. As the literature on academic English has clearly delineated fundamental grammatical features such as nominalisation, premodification in noun phrases, hedging/boosting, the use of the passive and signalling, the objective of the present study is to ascertain the employment of the aforementioned grammatical patterns in the abstracts of Master’s students who successfully completed their studies within a two-year period (2021-2022 and 2022-2023).

The years selected for the study were chosen deliberately, as the students were expected to enrol in the relevant academic courses. This allowed for the measurement of the impact of the courses on the students’ performances. The abstracts that have been selected are part of the corpus developed within the research project KEGA 018TTU-4/2024. The objective of the mentioned project is to qualitatively analyse the abstracts written in students’ mother tongues and foreign languages to cultivate the language performance of university students.

Keywords: Academic coursework, academic grammar, the impact, the corpus, Master’s theses.