Discourse Features of Written Mexican Spanish: Current Research in Contrastive Rhetoric and Its Implications

In the instruction of composition skills in both English and Spanish, teachers need to address language features at the text level, not just at the sentence level.1 Many times students may master the vocabulary and the grammar of a language and still be unable to produce acceptable compositions because of problems due to conflicting discourse patterns-that is, the organization and development of text via the logical arrangement of ideas. This paper will analyze discourse features of compositions written in Spanish by secondaryschool students in Mexico, will draw comparisons with those written in English by Anglo-American students in the United States, and will discuss the implications of the results of this research for teaching and evaluating composition skills in Spanish language programs.