Focusing on reference chain construction in academic texts fragments, the main purpose of this paper is, to show that the analysis of the topic organization of these texts enables the perception of difficulties that students demonstrate in establishing reference chain. Through these analyses, we identify and explain weaknesses on building this chain, such as ambiguities in recognition of topics as well as difficulties in introducing new pieces of information and in maintaining a discourse topic. Moreover, with these investigations, we verified that academic texts constitute essential indexes for evaluation the language use skills of their producers. Therefore, these studies may serve as a valuable starting point for planning activities that might assist students in developing necessary skills to reference chain construction of new texts. Therefore, we consider that the Modular Approach to Discourse Analysis constitutes a relevant approach to the study of texts produced by university students.

Keywords: Academic Texts. Reference Chain. Modular Approach.