Abstract:

Successful professional communication requires higher education students to master academic writing in order to give a clear focus on the research problem and to organize logically the flow of ideas.

Students of engineering specialties studying under the Program “Translator” at the Engineering Academy of People’s Friendship University of Russia (RUDN University) face serious challenges in properly managing their writing skills. A survey conducted among the advanced L2 learners revealed that their main problem consists in disorganization of text space, poor sentence structure and lack of linking words.

The paper is intended to improve university students’ skills in Spanish academic writing through the analysis of Spanish scientific text structure revealing communicative pragmatic segments within the text, and their discourse markers, which serve to develop a broader academic vocabulary.

The module made up of engineering texts taken from publicly available theses and scientific articles in Spanish, presents professionally oriented content for students of engineering specialties. The authors analyze conceptual structure of the academic paper and point out basic communicative pragmatic segments, which provide a clear and progressive unfolding of the academic paper. Every communicative pragmatic segment is provided with discourse verbal markers used to fulfill different discursive strategies.

The findings can be used in teaching L2 Spanish for academic purposes.

Keywords:

Higher education, Spanish, advanced L2 learners, academic writing.