Conceptualizing Credibility-Building Strategies with Specialization for Teaching Advertising Writing

Advertising discourse instruction challenges English-for-Specific-Purposes (ESP) teachers with no advertising specialist background. Teaching persuasive language structure and choice may develop students' linguistic repertoires for realizing advertising strategies in copywriting assignments; however, the rationale for deploying particular strategies and the underlying principles forming the strategies may remain invisible to both the ESP teacher and students. Considering this, the present study adopts the concepts of Specialization for revealing the knowledge-knower structure of brand credibility and conceptualizing credibility-building strategies as Specialization codes. This paper also describes how the knowledge about brand credibility and credibility-building strategies were applied and taught in a marketing and public relations (MPR) writing course. The conceptualization, recontextualization, and transfer of such knowledge shed light on how ESP teachers can integrate their knowledge about language into subject knowledge for more effective design and planning of the ESP courses.