The main distinctive features of Academic Grammar can be listed as follows:

• Focus on Academic assignments:  Academic Grammar recognises that students in an ESL-medium university curriculum face the communicative hurdle of producing written assignments in English for their disciplinary teachers.  We expect that need to determine how students make use of Academic Grammar.  So this resource is structured to offer one general category of advice, applicable to any written assignment ["Academic writing"], and 3 specific assignment categories: the Essay, the Literature Review (essay), and the Research report.

• Customised for Hong Kong students:  it provides a resource designed for the Hong Kong context, drawing on insights into Chinese-English contrastive rhetoric, and taking account of the language learning problems of Cantonese learners of English, the language needs of students of the Arts, Education and Social Sciences at HKU, and offering examples from the writing of Hong Kong students;

• Re-defining "grammar":  it challenges conventions of what a "grammar" should cover in its scope, providing a resource which addresses student needs for rules and guidelines in their writing, but at the same time recognising that grammar has important social and pragmatic dimensions;

• Catering to diverse disciplinary contexts: Academic Grammar is most effectively presented and learned when applied to specific disciplinary contexts, and when using authentic texts - hence the need to customise Academic Grammar to meet the needs of Cantonese-native-speaking students, tackling academic writing and speaking tasks in a diverse range of academic disciplines;

• Providing a self-access supplement:  it provides a resource to supplement other self-access provision in support of student attempts to meet the academic communication demands of undergraduate study in the Arts, Education and Social Sciences;

• Supporting tutors: the broad disciplinary range of examples is intended to contribute additional support to tutors trying to enrich their writing response practices across these writing-intensive disciplines of the Arts, Education and Social Sciences;