A student with generally weak language skills is not likely to solve the issues over the time period of one single course. Measures to strengthen a student’s language skills therefore need to be planned using an overall approach that looks at the entire study programme.
Language is a skill and it requires practice to improve it. A lot of practice. One strategy could be to systematically introduce progressive writing tasks into the courses of the programme with the primary aim of 1/ forcing the students to practice their writing, and 2/ identifying weak students so that these 3/ can receive feedback and recommendations on how they need to work to improve their writing skills.
One difficulty is, of course, that individual courses in most cases do not have language skills explicitly included in the intended learning outcomes, which is why it is difficult to have mandatory writing assignments that only aim to improve the students’ language skills. The assignments must relate to the content of the course. However, an assignment can be designed to also include language practice as a positive side effect. See, for example Tips! Systematic language training through a series of programme courses – an example
/Tomas Jansson, UPE