Developing Academic Language Competence of Chinese English Leaners: From the Perspective of Activity Theory

This paper describes a course designed to develop Chinese English-major undergraduates’ academic language competence. Participants were from one intact class of 28 senior students of English-major. Students’ research article (RA) writings of one semester were collected as the main data. Findings of the study show that academic linguistic features and structure can be learned and transferred through the mediating tools: (a) the exemplars of sample RAs; (b) teacher’s demonstration, feedback, and mini-training sessions; and (c) genre and norms of RAs. This study is believed to shed new light on English RA writing teaching practices to Chinese EFL learners.

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