Students’ Perceptions of Academic Writing: A Needs Analysis of EAP in China

Abstract

Academic writing remains a prominent issue for students and teachers in Asian EFL contexts. English courses offered in mainland China at tertiary levels mostly focus on teaching English for general purposes, and few concern writing for academic purposes, even for English majors. This small-scale needs analysis study reports on a survey of 50 Master of Arts students in English who are part of a new English for Academic Purposes program at a university in south China, as well as a focus group interview with a smaller group. Results indicate that 70% of the participants have never taken an academic writing course before and that the academic writing skills students found difficult are those less frequently taught. Students want a new course which provides them with generic features for writing the sections in a research article / thesis and, more importantly, the linguistic resources needed for writing academic papers appropriately. Current Teaching of Academic English at the University Level in China Tertiary students in EFL contexts are often faced with a gap between their limited command of L2 English academic literacies and their much more developed L1 academic literacies. In mainland China, while many universities are becoming more globally oriented, few institutions have established English language centers to provide specific linguistic consultancy for nonnative English-speaking students, as those in English-dominant countries or other contexts in Asia (e.g., Hong Kong and Singapore) have done. The majority of universities in mainland China offer “College English” courses, employing a textbook oriented for College English Test (CET) preparation that emphasizes grammar drilling (Zhang & Luo, 2004) and overlooks academic writing. Due to local constraints such as “large class size, disjunction between classroom instruction and the CET test and students’ test-driven learning styles” (You, 2004, p. 255), students’ academic writing proficiency remains low. As a result, Chinese students are constantly reported as able to attain high scores on grammarbased tests yet unable to write acceptable English compositions. According to Xu (2005), most Chinese students would like to rely on writing handbooks or directly imitate the format of published articles by borrowing certain expressions when required to write academic papers. Even though academic / thesis writing courses are offered in a few universities, they are usually teacher-centered lectures, with only referencing skills and thesis layout being taught, while elaborations on moves [the smallest discourse units that perform a certain communicative or 1Language Education in Asia, 2013, 4(1), 5-22. http://dx.doi.org/10.5746/LEiA/13/V4/I1/A2/Cai