Cultural Factors in EAP Teaching — Influences of Thought Pattern on English Academic Writing

In the last decade, more and more EFL teachers in the universities of China have been aware of the feasibility and necessity of teaching English for Academic Purpose (EAP), which is identified as one type of English for Specific Purposes, to students of non-English majors. Among the EAP courses, academic writing is considered as the most helpful one. More and more scholars of ESP in China have conducted researches on English academic writing (EAW) including analysis on the syntactic characteristics of English for academic purposes, corpus-based study of English dimension adjectives in academic speaking and writing, and comparative study on Natives’ EAW and Chinese EAW. It was pointed that the EAW research in China focuses on language form and rules, but neglects the correlation of contents and thoughts. Therefore, this research studies the influences of cultural thought patterns on English academic writing by employing product approach to contrast vocabulary and discourse differences in EAW writings produced by Chinese students and native English students. Key Words: English for Academic Purpose (EAP); Cultural factors; Thought pattern; English Academic Writing