L'ensenyament de la sintaxi en català i castellà a l'Educació Secundària Obligatòria:/nel cas de les funcions sintàctiques

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to analyze the situation of teaching syntax in the Spanish Secondary Education (ESO), focusing on syntactic functions. The study comes as a result of the gap between college classes, where discussion of semantic composition is important, and Secondary school classes, which are based exclusively on identifying syntactic functions. The study begins by analyzing the role of syntax in education laws, and concludes that the study of syntax is not very prominent in the context of the study of language. A critical analysis of the study of syntax in real classrooms is carried out which covers the use of 10 different ESO books of "Lengua castellana" and "Llengua catalana". Teachers and students of three schools were also interviewed. The results confirm that contents are repetitive; definitions and terminology are imprecise and are not based on any specific theory, and exercises are mainly mechanical and taxonomic. Furthermore, to see if despite these data students really understand syntactic functions and to check the benefits of thematic relations, an experiment was carried out with 102 students from two different schools. It was observed that students mix up syntactic functions, they are not used to discussions and that continuous instruction on thematic relations could have potential benefits. The study points to a need for change in classroom methodology and for a better training of teachers that would make it possible to abandon the traditional system based exclusively on taxonomy and to introduce some basic notions of syntactic argumentation.