Encoding, decoding, packing and unpacking via agnation: Reformulating general knowledge into disciplinary concepts for teaching English academic writing

Abstract

In assessing student writing, instructors typically look for evidence that a writer has grasped concepts from the field and is using them appropriately. Texts may demonstrate this by linking discipline-specific knowledge to the everyday world, either translating common knowledge into classroom concepts, or from them. This procedure is particularly important in Economics, a real-world discipline. However, the language resources employed for this process are not generally an explicit part of the English for Specific Academic Purposes (ESAP) curriculum. This paper argues that an effective ESAP writing course should teach how language facilitates this translation process via agnation. This paper first explores the evolution of the approach to agnate relations, then applies the concept as either packing (placing common phenomena into technical terms) or unpacking (explaining technical terms through common phenomena). It then gives the results of applying this method in a classroom setting: the course “Writing for Disciplinary Studies” for Chinese Economics students studying in English. It was found that students’ writing scored higher accuracy and clarity marks when they had been explicitly instructed in these agnate relations and how to employ them in writing, but work could be done to make this process more student-friendly.