In what order should I teach the concepts?

Question

I taught one course of beginning high school Spanish last year, but I'm not satisfied with the order I went in. I feel like I should introduce verbs earlier, maybe even making them second on the agenda (right after introductions and useful phrases for the classroom).

What order should I go in?

I know I need to cover things like articles, possession, basic school-related nouns, food, and people. They need question words and pronouns and confusing stuff like gustar. What should I start with? Where should I go from there?

Answer 1

I took Spanish one twice (not because I failed) but once in middle school and once in high school. I found that both times the teachers taught things in the same order...for the most part.

You've got it right about introductions and useful phrases first. That's what just about every teacher does.

Verbs should be second, definitely but start with regular, easy, and common verbs. We always started off with the -ar verbs and worked on those for maybe a week, having to memorize the conjugations. After that we learned -er/-ir but those are similar so I think you can teach them together.

We learned gustar early on (only to learn why it was different in Spanish 2). We also got a taste of a few irregular verbs after the regular ones were taught.

I think next would be to teacher adjectives....teaching them about the whole masculine/feminine and noun agreement thing.

After that we just learned some more vocabulary that would be essential to speaking spanish and the teacher would ask us simple questions and we'd have to form full sentence answers.

I don't know if I'm going too fast but that should last for a while. Towards the end of the year, we practiced more reading and listening (nothing too hard of course), how to ask questions and learned the correct pronunciation of the letters since a lot of the kids were getting them wrong.

To tell you the truth, we didn't even touch foods until Spanish 2 unless it was something very commonly said.

Answer 2

I learned Italian from library books before taking classes in order to speak.

With verbs, I learned infinitives first. Then conjugations. On my first trip to Italy, one cousin spoke to me, using infinitives, thinking I may not understand conjugations. I understood him perfectly.
When I tried to "parrot" from tapes, I realized that I was memorizing every verb conjugation as if it were a "new word". I decided that as I had learned English, many verbs conjugate by the same set rules. Irregular verbs just had to be memorized, same as English.

The most important thing I found to be helpful, was to learn vocabulary in related groups. Such as vocabulary related to school and friends. Then vocabulary related to travel, hotels, restaurants, transportation, etc. The same with family conversation, automobiles, clothing and shopping, etc.

This is the manner in which we learn as children. In groupings, so to speak. Unrelated vocabulary is confusing and not repetitious. I found it to be more interesting as well.
As for articles, foreign languages always use an article with the noun. In English we use the noun only, but I learned that a noun must have it, as in Italian, "Il", "La" "Le", "Gli", "Lo", etc. These all denote "the", those, etc. SP. is different, as El, is to Il. The, (M).

This was my own way. I'm not sure of the standard methods in schools. All I had in school was 2 1/2 years of Latin. Too long ago to admit.
I was/am an adult, not a child, although I felt like one.