Reformulating via conceptual translation: What agnation patterns in American Economic student academic writing can reveal for EAP teachers and students

One goal of discipline-specific academic assignments is translating observations of the actual world into disciplinary explanations. Students thereby prove that they can connect sophisticated field knowledge with general experience. To contribute linguistic evidence regarding how this process works, the present research examines particular patterns of agnation (via Halliday and Matthiessen, 2014, p. 49): the ways in which one semantic component of the text is related to another one, even if the two components do not necessarily share grammatical similarity (as per Halliday and Matthiessen, 1999, pp. 223–224). We do this specifically in the context of the adjunct in other words, a type of Code Gloss specifically used for reformulating an idea (as per Hyland, 2007, pp. 272–273). The research relates this pattern with conceptual framework theories (Meehan, 1988) and proposes that agnation patterns reveal how students’ general observations evolve within a disciplinary conceptual framework. The data includes 8 Economic student papers selected from the Michigan Corpus of Upper-Level Student Papers (MICUSP). The authors treat the data via detailed lexicogrammatical and semantic analysis, aiming for qualitative results that can be expanded for future studies. They reveal four specific agnation patterns used by these students to engage with their economic conceptual frameworks.