To enhance the university students’ ability of reading and writing research articles (RAs) in their disciplinary journals has become a subject of immense pedagogical interest at tertiary level in China. The study focused on 76 undergraduates across disciplines in a university who are required in an EAP course to identify moves, steps, metadiscourse and related linguistic features in their collected RAs from their discipline-specific journals. Questionnaires and interviews are employed to evaluate the effects. The results indicate that the identification of generic features may develop learners’ genre knowledge and academic literacy, improve their ability of reading discipline-specific RAs and promote their confidence of writing RAs. The findings have many pedagogical implications for the reform of college English teaching in China.