Learning English for academic purposes: Why Chinese EFL learners find EAP so difficult to master

Greater China has the largest number of learners of English in the world, with English for Academic Purposes (EAP) as the target variety. Most of them have difficulty mastering EAP. This may be partly explained by tremendous typological/linguistic differences between English and Chinese, which belong to different language families and have hardly any features in common. Very little of Chinese learners’ knowledge of their first language has any reference value in the process of learning English, the most important foreign language. This paper discusses some of the most salient typological differences and a few lexico-grammatical errors commonly found in Chinese EAP learners’ language output. Copyright © 2009 Revista Canaria De Estudios Ingleses.