How Second (L2) and Heritage (HL) Language Learners Can Draw on Existing Knowledge to Overcome Common Discourse Issues in Spanish Compositions

Student error analysis is an area of investigation that can shed light on how students learn. It can also serve as a pedagogical tool to increase students’ awareness of the most common types of errors to avoid. Quality of student output, however, isn’t solely determined by the number of errors students make, but also the extent to which students successfully employ certain other discourse-related strategies to improve their compositions. This paper argues that, aside from grammatical concerns, and at least from a discourse point of view, students already possess much of the knowledge they need in order to write better compositions. Both second (L2) and heritage (HL) learners of Spanish typically already possess some advanced writing skills in English, but we have observed that when attempting to write in Spanish, many of these same students will resort to more remedial means of presenting and/or expressing their ideas. In other words, unaware that so many discourse skills are transferable from English to Spanish, students will not necessarily apply the same strategies, or at least to the same degree, as they would if writing a similar essay in English. This paper, therefore, provides ten tips that students can draw on to improve both the presentation and expression of their ideas in compositions. Recommendations are divided into two categories, the first being aspects a student should always keep in mind when approaching any piece of writing, while the second are negative tendencies that are quite common, but which a student should necessarily avoid.