Learning another language is a difficult task, especially when it comes to the English language and its grammar.

To help those who need it, Saskatchewan Polytechnic's Intercultural Services started a clinic to improve their international students' writing, not only to help them in school, but also in the workforce.

Selinda England is the Language Director for Sask Polytech's Intercultural Services and runs the class. They had their first session on Tuesday.

"We find that the international students are very good academically," England said. "In their studies they do very well. The issue is learning certain vocabulary like business expressions or how to navigate the business environment in Canada, because it's quite different from their home countries. So that's the focus of these writing workshops."

This is one of the reasons why they began the class. While they work hard academically, they found international students were performing at about 85% compared to Canadian students.

Another reason for the class is that employers find that international students are amazing workers but found their writing skills to be lacking.

"The topics are all grammar based and they were selected mainly through feedback through the business instructors at the college," England added. "So, we're going to focus on subject verb agreement using articles, because many Asian languages don't use articles like 'a' or 'and' or 'the.' Then we'll also work on prepositions and then academic language as well as citations."

The first class had a pretty good start, with 21 students and more coming in after the clinic began. The writing clinic will continue later this month and hopefully further improve the writing skills of international students.