Developing Chinese Undergraduate English-Majors ’ Research Article Writing Competence

This paper describes a course designed to help Chinese undergraduate English-majors acquire competence in English research article (RA) writing. Such competence comprises three components: 1) discourse structure of an RA; 2) scientific thinking and reasoning; and 3) academic language. Participants were from one intact class of 28 senior English majors at a university in Shanghai. This course was experimental and designed to develop a scheme for teaching RA writing to the senior students in China. Students ’ RA writings throughout the semester were collected as the main data. Findings show that discourse knowledge, scientific thinking, and linguistic structure can be learned and transferred using these mediating tools: 1) the exemplars of sample RAs; 2) teacher’s demonstration and feedback through mini-training sessions; and 3) analysis of genre and norms of RAs. The process-centered, theme-oriented and inquiry-based pedagogy adopted in the course may shed some light on English RA writing teaching practices to Chinese EFL learners