Negotiating “Third Spaces”: EAP Apprenticeship, Academic Writing, and Chinese Students

Abstract

The aims of this exploratory research on the academic writing apprenticeships of Chinese students are four-fold: 1) determine what the students thought were the purposes of academic writing; 2) identify what were the most common errors when writing for academic purposes; 3) find out if the students were adopting the preferred organizational patterns in writing argumentative essays; and 4) determine teacher perceptions on the academic writing program. To accomplish these aims, the researcher surveyed 47 Chinese students, analyzed the organization of 31 sample essays, conducted an error analysis of 120 paragraphs, and interviewed 10 teachers of EAP academic writing. Findings revealed that: students associated academic writing generally with skills-based improvement rather than development of higher order skills as criticality; students acculturated to the preferred ways of organizing an essay; lexis posed the most serious issue for student writing; and teachers interviewed generally raised concerns on the effectiveness and direction the writing program has taken.