Academic writing can be laborious for Chinese L2 undergraduates, not to mention that assessing their work is challenging and complex. While the linguistic features of Chinese undergraduate writing have been reidentified to be different in recent studies, experimental research on move analysis through the lens of contrastive rhetoric offers insights of Chinese students’ approaches to fulfilling the rhetorical requirements in writing. From the sociocognitive perspective, this study investigated Chinese students’ essays across genres and languages, focusing on moves/steps in introductions and their relation to essay quality. 264 essays by L2 novice writers were statistically analyzed. Results reveal that most participants’ writings gradually adopted elements of English academic writing, but they hybridly structured essays across genres and languages. Only 25.7% of the essays contained the three primary moves necessary for introductions and received the highest scores. Irrespective of language or genre, 80.3% stated essay’s purpose in introductions, but 19.7% did not. More than one-third of the participants began narrative essays with extensive descriptions of topic background, a feature of Chinese writing; such an opening strategy led to the essays not academically valued, especially when thesis and gap were not identified. The research findings hold implications for academic writing teaching and assessment.
