5th Post: My Syllabus

Hello again! I hope you are doing well! Today's post will focus on the syllabus of language courses.

When I think of all syllabuses I have followed learning languages, the general pattern I observe consists of levels and progressive contents: from the basics (easy) to the complex (difficult). At first sight, it seems a very logical way of proceeding, but a flaw of it is that, usually, the difficult or more complex parts are hidden to the learner as if, as student, one is not capable to cope with more advanced aspects of language. Here I do not mean that I wished to learn more difficult things sooner, but that this content could be available if it was useful in order to understand basic stages. I would say the same happened to me in maths classroom, for example. If complicated aspects arose, they were sort of considered as the "dark side". In this way, it is not that progressive syllabus is bad, but not everything is progressive in itself, and usually it is necessary to jump steps forwards or steps backwards to understand languages as a whole.

Spanish textbook syllabus

I would divide the courses I followed into two groups, the first one consisting of Catalan, Spanish and English and the other one, of French and German (which I actually never studied formally...). This distinction I make exclusively for this post, since I have had different syllabuses for those languages in formal education environments.

Spanish textbook syllabus

The former group was very much characterized by the point I was trying to make on progressiveness. I studied all of them in according to traditional grammar, since the classes where planned following basically the textbooks used. How were the textbooks organized? In units, from the easiest topic to the most complex. It was the same structure all over again: from names, modifiers, adjectives, verb, subordinate.... to syntactical structures: simple sentences with the ver to be, full simple sentences, subordinate clauses... And all these contents where ridiculously camouflaged with different topics of interest from the immediate environment (food, transportation, school, sports, etc.) and communicative functions. Sadly, the major focus was on grammar (syntax and PoS) and few time was left to debate on different topics of interest -here the notion of interest is somehow ironic... how can, for instance, sports (the same vocabulary and texts on sports) be of interest?, and to practice communicative functions.