| Summary: | 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.
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