ABSTRACT
Multidimensional analysis regards combinations of linguistic features as indicators of a particular register and shifts researchers’ attention from specified linguistic features to linguistic variation as a continuum with clustering patterns and normalised frequencies of clusters of linguistic features. Cross-sectional comparison helped to examine the gap between the register features of the Chinese English as a foreign language (EFL) learners’ writing and those of their British counterparts. X. Zhao and W. Dai found inconsistency of register style in Chinese undergraduate EFL learners’ academic writing, with formal language structures mixed with informal ones. Students actively engaged in a module of English for general academic purposes (EGAP) called English through Projects with a focus on academic writing. Through the EGAP module, the EFL learners produced texts that more resembled academic prose on three out of five dimensions: more informationally dense, more context-independent and less overtly persuasive.
