Challenges in Acquiring English for Academic Purposes (EAP)

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.

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