Investigating Tantrayukti as a Framework for Knowledge-Building in ESL Writing

Abstract

Academic writing in ESL classrooms attempt to facilitate literacy skills, often considered general human cognitive capacities such as defining, explaining, organising, illustrating, justifying, inferring, and concluding. Although these activities do not belong to specific cultures and have been seen to recur across knowledge traditions, their recurrence does not imply that they are conceptualised, received, valued, presented, taught, or examined in identical ways. This paper outlines an exploratory study of Tantrayukti, a set of interpretive and compositional devices described in Indian śāstric traditions, using the first chapter of the Sūtrasthāna of the Caraka Saṃhitā as an initial corpus. The study examines if Tantrayuktis are merely Sanskrit labels for familiar discourse functions encountered in English academic writing or if they reveal situated configurations of knowledge-building that may not be explicit or present at all in dominant English academic-writing frameworks. The researcher adopted a five-stage data analysis method that combined functional coding, analysis of knowledge-organisation roles, multi-label Tantrayukti coding, relational and sequential analysis, and provisional pedagogical interpretation. Once a large corpus is analysed, the design intends to incorporate intercoder reliability and descriptive measures of frequency, density, co-occurrence, functional breadth, positional distribution, and transition patterns. It is hoped that the analysis will demonstrate whether the framework makes distinctive textual operations, constellations, and sequences available for representation and interpretation of meaning and, subsequently, for writing pedagogy.