Academic skills are now an integral element of the Monash University Library‟s educational program, joining the more established library-taught skill of research. Librarians and learning skills advisers work to present combined classes, and jointly develop programs to deepen the educational experience of students, both through and alongside the curriculum (cocurricula). The Law Library team are fortunate in having a close association with the Monash Faculty of Law, thereby strengthening integration through the provision of shared classes in compulsory law units. Librarians and learning skills advisers have largely complementary skills: good academic writing is based on solid research, and academic argument and its expression are limited by inadequate research. On request from the Law Faculty, the Law Library team teach into a compulsory first-year unit which aims to improve students‟ research and writing skills. The learning skills adviser and the librarians planned, prepared and delivered classes jointly; starting with analysing the question, establishing a framework for the research, and ending with drafting the legal advice that utilises the research. Moreover, the recent educational drive to extend curricula and develop graduate attribute statements has consolidated the methodological foundation of the educational programs. In response to the 2011 curriculum review carried out by the Monash Law Faculty, the Law Library team drew on the draft Threshold Learning Outcomes for Law (Australian Learning and Teaching Council, 2010) combining these with the Research Skill Development Framework (Willison & O‟Regan, 2006) to map the classes currently offered and suggest further directions.

In the Australian higher education context, academic language competence is one of the keys to success for students in their degree programs. Students with underdeveloped communication skills in the relevant discourse community are at risk of not meeting minimum standards in their university courses. REACH (Retention – English for Academic Completion Help) is a set of aca-demic language modules embedding relevant language strategies into course content related to course assessment. It was developed at an Australian uni-versity for students at risk of not continuing their participation through failure in a first-year course. This article outlines the REACHing Further stage of the REACH project and presents data collected for part of the evaluation of the REACH approach while discussing the distinctive contextual academic lan-guage support in the academic disciplines. REACHing Further increased ac-cessibility to the REACH modules online and provided an online facilitator. This article reports that those students who were engaged with the REACH modules generally valued the support and expressed the view that they would recommend others to participate in future. Although the overall engagement by the identified target group was low compared with the mainstream students in the courses selected, examiners and tutors of the target courses indicated that the REACH modules were well linked to the course materials and suggested that students should use them more actively. It is recommended that a more interactive, systematic and personalised approach needs to be attractively presented to the target groups and individuals while also researching effective ways of offering academic language support.