Argumentative Writing in Spanish as a Heritage Language

Interpretations of the Socio-Political Role of Mexican American Corrido

Abstract

This study presents a descriptive linguistic analysis of 18 essays written by speakers of Spanish as a heritage language (SHL). The purpose of the essays is to analyze the socio-political role of the Mexican American corrido. Previous studies (Montaño-Harmon, 1991; Spicer-Escalante M. L., 2002) have characterized the rhetorical and lexico-grammatical repertoire of speakers of SHL as limited to the addition of information, the personal experience, and the ‘everyone knows’ type of data. However, the results of this study suggest that rhetorical and lexico-grammatical repertoire of this group of speakers is more comprehensive since it includes different rhetorical strategies valued in a written academic register. I focus on analyzing the use of the evaluative definition of a concept, as this was the dominant argumentative strategy employed with varying degrees of effectiveness in the corpus.