This paper describes a course designed to help Chinese undergraduate English-majors acquire competence in English research article （RA） writing. Such competence comprises three components： 1） discourse structure of an RA; 2） scientific thinking and reasoning; and 3） academic language. Participants were from one intact class of 28 senior English majors at a university in Shanghai. This course was experimental and designed to develop a scheme for teaching RA writing to the senior students in China. Students＇ RA writings throughout the semester were collected as the main data. Findings show that discourse knowledge, scientific thinking, and linguistic structure can be learned and transferred using these mediating tools： 1） the exemplars of sample RAs; 2） teacher＇s demonstration and feedback through mini-training sessions; and 3） analysis of genre and norms of RAs. The process-centered, theme-oriented and inquiry-based pedagogy adopted in the course may shed some light on English RA writing teaching practices to Chinese EFL learners.
