Applying Corpus-based Genre Analysis into the Teaching of Academic Chinese Writing

With an increasing number of international students coming to China for higher education, the learning needs of academic Chinese increased sharply. However, Chinese for Academic Purposes (CAP) is still in its infancy in both academic research and teaching practice. As a result, students lack the support for their academic Chinese skills and encounter difficulties according to their feedback. Meanwhile, the studies on English for Academic Purposes (EAP) pedagogy are fruitful. Among all the pedagogies, corpus-based instruction with genre analysis were found to be an effective approach in improving students’ EAP writing abilities. This study thus applied corpus-based genre analysis teaching approach to CAP teaching and examined the effectiveness. Through the construction and analysis of a specific corpus, this paper first investigated the move structure and high-frequency words and expressions of Chinese research article (RA) abstracts in the discipline of Economics and Management Science. Afterwards, a mini learning corpus was compiled for students’ exploration. The learning materials and sample tasks were introduced and data were collected from students’ feedback and writing samples before and after the teaching intervention. The results revealed that, firstly, the conventional move structure of Chinese RA abstracts in Economics and Management Science was I-MR-D, which is similar to English RA abstracts. Method and Results are two conventional moves. Second, corpus-based genre analysis can partially improve students’ performances in academic writing. After the teaching intervention, students’ awareness of text structure and the use of academic Chinese expressions improved noticeably. Though based on a small sample size, the research findings contribute towards the understanding of linguistic conventions of Chinese RA abstracts. Moreover, the materials and pedagogy used in this project shed new light on the instruction of Chinese writing as well as CAP curriculum development.