Chapter 8. Rhetorical organisation of Textbooks

In this chapter, we identify and describe the rhetorical organization of the Textbook genre, based on a part of the PUCV-2006 Academic Corpus of Spanish. This corpus includes a total amount of one hundred and twenty-six textbooks collected from four disciplines: Social Work, Psychology, Construction Engineering and Industrial Chemistry. In order to do so, we identify steps and moves of the genre, and we describe the communicative macro-purposes underlying these discourse units. In addition, we selected passages from the texts to exemplify the corresponding steps and moves. A new macro-level of analysis is introduced and justified, which becomes necessary for a better description of an extensive textual unit such as this. We have named it macromove. At the end of the chapter, we answer the question appearing in the chapter’s title and we explain why the Textbook would have a rhetorical organization, which we denominate “colony-in-loops”.