Recently, Joe, a foreign English teacher in China, said to me, "I feel dazed and disoriented; my students here are unusually quiet.I can"t tell if they understand my lessons."His plight is not surprising. Many foreign ESL (English as a second language) instruc-tors often feel confused when they first step into a Chinese classroom. Chinese ESL students am different because their mindset is not Western. This generates three poten-tial English literacy challenges that separate them from foreign instructors. These ob-stacles are: the influence of prior cultural and personal knowledge, the impact of different educational systems and teaching philoso-phiesand unique language characteristics due to linguistic degrees of difference between English and Chinese--via grammar, seman-tics, word structure, plus a different system of literary aesthetics and organizational logic.