One of the key priorities in EU documents ‘Europe 2020’ (‘E 2020’), ‘Education and Training 2020’ (‘ET 2020’), other EU youth strategy documents is mobile youth highly educated and open to communication, fully prepared for academic and professional career, and having experience of studies and work in foreign universities and companies. The emphasis of achieving this aim lies on the need to improve the quality of studies in universities, in particular, academic excellence and equal opportunities. A high quality contemporary university requires the competence that enables a student to understand lectures on the subject in a foreign language, to participate in academic discussions in the European Higher Education area, to study in various joint programmes at Lithuanian and foreign universities, to participate in student mobility exchange programmes and international projects, to feel confidence and self-esteem in any academic and professional foreign language discourse. Thus, the development of academic foreign language competence is receiving more and more increasing attention in the contemporary university.

English, that has long become a lingua franca in the academic and professional discourse, is a compulsory subject for all the students at Vytautas Magnus university (VMU). The development of academic English communicative competence of the students with different linguistic competence level and no previous experience of academic language learning in secondary school and integration of academic context into the language subject programmes has become a core need for both students and teachers. The selection and correct employment of the textbook and other teaching material to satisfy the needs of academic language competence development is quite a challenge for a language teacher as regards necessary academic context and language skills development. 

This study is aimed at:

 (1) finding out students’ academic language needs and competence at levels B1 and B2 and rating of its importance from students’ and teachers’ point of view, and

(2) investigating how the selected and employed textbook satisfies their needs from the students’ and teachers’ point of view.

The methods of qualitative and quantitative research have been applied to achieve the aims of the study.

The paper will present the analysis of the findings obtained from the questionnaire and interviews completed by students and teachers, and the conclusions regarding the selection and employment of the textbook to meet the students’ needs of academic English competence development.

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