ABSTRACT
This chapter analyzes how beginner Spanish heritage learners organize their essays in order to understand their discourse competence and management of rhetorical strategies. Three measures—global structure, argumentative sequences, and cohesion devices—were combined to analyze features of discourse organization, argumentative structure, and textual cohesion. The analysis also detected specific areas of interest for instruction. Overall, learners are able to weakly organize an argumentative structure and present some evidence to support their opinions, mostly relying on general statements, evaluative assertions, and direct and indirect advice. Features of information dislocation, inconclusive segments, and excessive repetition of lexical and pronominal elements to generate cohesion indicate incipient discourse competence in Spanish. The chapter concludes by introducing two pedagogical strategies to target main issues of textual organization and genre management, seeking to provide learners with analytical tools to critically understand argumentative discourse structures and functions.
