Making bricks without straw

After three full weeks on the SFI Språkverket programme, I thought it was time to reflect on my initial experiences and opinions as well as summarize how it works. I thought initially I'd describe how the programme is designed.

The programme is largely a lecture based syllabus that contains students studying for both the C and D exams. Each student is allocated to a base group teacher who is responsible for making sure you have a plan for your studies and who meets with you every month to review your progress. When you arrive on a Monday morning the first thing you have to do is to plan your week's study, Typically one chooses from:

• Grammar lectures
• Comprehension exercises
• Listening exercises
• Speaking activities
• Conversation Practice with a Swedish Senior
• Lectures about famous Swedish cultural figures / aspects of Swedish life
• Self Study
  

In addition to the title, the activities also state which level they belong to, either C or D. The lectures also fit into a theme. Themes normally last for around a month and enable the teaching staff to review a trench of your work and give them to the opportunity to evaluate your progress. Our current theme is literature.

Every Monday morning my base group teacher painfully reiterates that we should all carefully and rationally review our progress and use our judgement to pick activities that will develop our weaknesses rather than just picking lectures and activities that sound interesting or that we're good at.

Herein lies, in my opinion, the fundamental ideological problem of the course. This supposition assumes that you can make an informed, astute judgement about your needs when you are little more than a novice. How can you make those choices when you don't know what you don't know?

It's also seems a classic modern teaching approach, probably with the intention of “empowering the student” or some such pseudo bizspeak nonsense. In theory, yes it could work, but it's spoilt by most people's tendency towards laziness. The other problem is that you can't make informed choices about what to study based on your strengths and weaknesses if you don't know the totality of the syllabus. How am I able to make sure if choose one lecture or activity over another that it won't hinder me in the future? What grammatical principals should I know, and at what point in the syllabus will knowing those principals really be useful? Surely these are only questions that a trained professional with an overview of the entire subject will have?

I was told that we'd meet with our base group teacher and set out a plan of what I need to study and this simple plan would inform the direction of my studies. So far there hasn't been the slightest threat of this occurring, so therefore I've decided that it's up to me to try and make sense of the syllabus and arrange to talk to the teaching staff next week.