ZHAW School of Applied Linguistics 263 16 Ukraine / By Tatyana Yakhontova, Halyna Kaluzhna, Tetiana Fitio, Dmytro Mazi and Volodymyr Morenets 16.1 Introduction Ukraine is a rather new (in a historical perspective) independent state with a rich and complicated history of struggling for freedom and democracy. During the 23 years of its existence, the country has experienced drastic changes in all spheres of life, which are interconnected and which could not leave education apart. In Ukrainian Higher Education, reforms are mostly connected with the country’s joining the “Bologna Process” in 2005. They have become evident, for example, in making the assessment system comparable to or compatible with that of Eu- ropean universities, by introducing new approaches to teaching and learning, promoting changes in curriculum and subjects taught, etc. It has appeared to be a challenging endeavor since the education in Ukraine as well as in the other post-Soviet countries significantly differs from western educa- tion; for instance, Ukrainian academic institutions have only relatively recently started to grant bachelor’s and master’s degrees. Introduction of new programs and disciplines at Ukrainian educational institutions requires new approaches and reconsideration of learners’ skills and competencies, literacy being the cen- tral one among them. Regretfully, literacy support and development has never been the focus of Ukrainian education. Even now, when writing has already started to attract the at- tention of university teachers, Ukrainian students continue to experience serious problems with academic reading and writing assignments. These problems seem to result from the absence of regular writing courses and explicit and consistent writing support at all educational levels. This literacy situation typical of Ukrainian education will be described further in this report together with new tendencies which are gradually becoming promi- nent. The report is based upon the information on education available in Ukraini- an sources as well as upon personal experiences and publications of its authors, university language teachers and researchers. The paper is theoretically framed by the current concept of genre viewed as central to the present day learning and teaching of academic literacy skills. 16.2 Concept of genre The understanding of genre underlying this paper primarily arises from the con- cept of Mikhail Bakhtin based on the idea of the communicative function of lan- guage. For Bakhtin, genre is a social phenomenon born by the specific goals and