Contrastive rhetoric, nowadays redefined as intercultural rhetoric, was born half a century ago with the main purpose of analysing second language earners’ writing in order to propose pedagogical applications that would help to improve it. However, classroom treatments have not been developed as often as they should have. In this paper, we revise the main pedagogical directives established by intercultural rhetoric and we apply them to a case study where we compare the use of ten categories of discourse markers in an expositiveargumentative essay written by Spanish native University students and Slovenian learners of SFL. Even though we reach the conclusion that students from Slovenia use these structures in a similar way to that of the native speakers, we consider that a pedagogical intervention is appropriate to correct some differences. We therefore propose a classroom debate to compare texts from the case study and the contrast of texts written in both mother tongues, as well as the implementation of a telecollaborative course between native speakers and Slovenian University students, which would aid the understanding of discourse markers and other aspects of Spanish usage.
SFL, Slovenian learners, intercultural rhetoric, discourse markers, didactic applications