As you come closer to the Oposiciones de inglés secundaria theoretical syllabus, you realise the only thing you can get from the Authorities is the number and title of the units to be studied. It is weird though, because the titles are in Spanish and there is no way to check the contents and the evaluation criteria (if you are lucky and they are published beforehand somewhere). That is the reason why the first thing my students and I do when we start working together is to look into THE syllabus and try to understand which contents the topics should include. This might seem obvious but have you ever found two versions of the same topic with rather different contents? I’m really used to it…
That’s why this post is titled THE Syllabus: because it is going to be the one and only when YOU come down to work on it. The title is the starting point to justify your choice of contents but some of them look like a riddle. Let’s take two grammar topics to see the perspective:
What’s the difference between topics 17 and 21?
Topic 17: La localización en el espacio: lugar, dirección y distancia.
Topic 21: El infinitivo y la forma -ing: sus usos.
Although both topics are included in the grammar block within the syllabus, the perspective or point of view for the contents development should be quite different.
The first topic is oriented from a functional approach to grammar. An account on how language is used to talk about location in space must be included. The second topic is purely descriptive. A description of the contexts of appearance of infinitives and -ing forms is to be depicted through the development of the unit.
Once perspective is understood, the task of pinpointing what should be clearly included in the topic comes up more easily.
Conversely, the organisation of topics in blocks of contents will make the tough task of managing contents easier but that’s something to be tackled soon…
