Over the last few decades, Swedish Higher Education institutions have been working on widened participation (Högskolelagen, 1992, p.1434) as part of a wider effort towards sustainable development and increased accessibility to university studies (Agenda 2030). As a consequence, student populations today bring with them a wider range of academic skills. This, in turn, means that teaching staff across disciplines face a myriad of challenges. In our presentation, we discuss an ongoing empirical study on teaching practices for the development of university students’ academic literacies in the social sciences, with a particular focus on the role of modelling as a teaching strategy. Using Academic Literacies (Lea & Street, 1998; Lillis, 2003; Lea, 2004; Eklund Heinonen et al., 2018) as the theoretical framework, the study aims at (a) identifying challenges as experienced by teaching staff in the Social Sciences, and (b) carrying out a pedagogical intervention. The project, which is a collaboration between two lecturers from the Social Sciences and two researchers from the Language Support Unit, comprises four stages, namely: (1) a needs analysis to map the faculty’s existing teaching practices and to identify their challenges in relation to their students’ academic skills; (2) planning of a pedagogical intervention through a series of workshops; (3) implementation of the intervention; and (4) assessment of the project. So far, the findings reveal that modelling is a crucial teaching strategy in making tacit knowledge and task instructions explicit. The project is also expected to contribute to our understanding of (a) the challenges teaching staff experience in Swedish Higher Education today and (b) how to best support university students’ development of academic literacies. Furthermore, the project’s findings will be used to develop a course for professional development targeting teaching staff at our university.