Julie King University of Nottingham UK email: Julie.King@nottingham.ac.uk Giving students what they need and academics what they want: developing students’ academic writing skills in a British university in China

The University of Nottingham is the first top 200 foreign university to establish an independent campus on the Chinese mainland. The Ningbo campus offers undergraduate and postgraduate programmes taught entirely in English, with nearly 1,000 students enrolled in 2005-06. The degrees at Ningbo are identical to those from the UK campus, so a key challenge for first year Chinese students studying at Ningbo is to meet the expectation of developing an individual academic voice in order to analyse and critique their own work and that of others independently, to express their own positions and opinions, and to persuade their readers of their own academic arguments. At Ningbo we focus on the development of the students' academic identities in their writing via a range of classroom tasks and awareness raising exercises, and specifically track the students' ability to handle tentative language or hedging. The paper concludes that overt instruction of academic writing skills can help equip students with the tools they need to develop their academic voice and ultimately function successfully in a British academic context (Wishnoff, 2000).


Julie King is Deputy Director of the Centre for English Language Education (CELE) at the University of Nottingham, UK. She is an experienced EAP and EFL tutor, teacher trainer and assessor.