Challenges in acquiring English for academic purposes (EAP)

Research output: Chapter in book / Conference proceedingChapter in an edited book (as author)Academic research

Abstract

This chapter focuses on Cantonese-L1 Hongkongers’ main difficulties in the process of learning English for Academic Purposes (EAP) or Standard English. As the British Received Pronunciation (RP) is widely used in teaching materials in Hong Kong schools, pronunciation difficulties at both the segmental and suprasegmental levels will be explained and illustrated with reference to phonological features in RP and Cantonese. Lexico-grammatical anomalies commonly found among Cantonese-L1 EFL learners, at elementary and intermediate levels, will be exemplified with the help of 12 salient corpus-based learner English structures. In addition, problems arising from the transference of the Chinese-specific ‘response to negative question’ pattern into English will also be discussed.
Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationMultilingual Hong Kong : languages, literacies and identities
PublisherSpringer Netherlands
Pages109-143
Number of pages35
ISBN (Electronic)9783319441955
ISBN (Print)9783319441931
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2017

Publication series

NameMultilingual Education
ISSN (Print)2213-3208

Keywords

  • Error analysis
  • Common errors
  • Chinese-English contrastive analysis
  • Cross-linguistic influence
  • Standard English
  • English for Academic Purposes
  • Chinglish
  • Interlanguage
  • Hong Kong English
  • Grammatical accuracy problems

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