To what extent are postgraduate students from China prepared for academic writing needed on UK master's courses?

This paper investigates the extent to which Chinese students are prepared for academic writing in higher education in the UK, by seeking evidence from a group of 40 Chinese students at a UK university. A mixed-methods approach combining both questionnaires and interviews was adopted to generate data. The main conclusion was that the training that Chinese students received in China may not have prepared them well for academic writing at an advanced level in the UK. This is based on the findings that there were significant differences between writing in the UK and writing in China, that writing was more emphasised in the UK than in China, that the students did not receive appropriate feedback on their work in China, and that they still had language barriers when they were writing in English in the UK. However, the results also showed that there were individual differences among the Chinese students, implying that they should not be treated as a homogenous group. This paper calls for further research on current popular teaching and learning practices at the undergraduate level in China and for information on the views of Chinese teachers.