While the emergence of the plural forms of English widely acknowledges the sociolinguistic realities in many countries and regions, it might also have an equally profound impact on English teaching and learning in those areas. The trend is for pedagogical models no longer to privilege so-called Standard English based on native varieties but to be built on the localised model. This article argues, however, that for English to continue to function as a "lingua franca", certain standards should be imposed on language use by Chinese students in their academic writing, so that the variant forms will not digress too much from the standard forms and so not result in unintelligibility or misunderstanding. Focusing on selected written data produced by advanced Chinese students, a distinction can be made between interlanguage and variant forms that mark the Chineseness in China English where both features can be situated on a continuum.