Uruguay First Year of Ciclo Básico - Spanish Language and Literature

This course outline is based on the Reformulación 2006 program. The program focuses on developing communication skills, both linguistic and non-linguistic, through the analysis and creation of oral and written texts. It also introduces fundamental concepts of language, text, and word structure. The curriculum is divided into four units:

Unit I: Foundations of Communication

• Objectives:
• Understand different forms of human communication.
• Understand codes as conventions necessary for coexistence.
• Analyze and characterize oral and written texts.
• Acquire the necessary lexicon for expressing and supporting observations.
• Content:
• Language: Human communication (linguistic and non-linguistic), codes, the Spanish language (Spanish or Castilian?), dialectal variations.
• Text: The text as a linguistic unit, written text characteristics, oral text characteristics.
• Word: Morphemes, phonemic and graphemic systems, dictionary use, accentuation, syllables, diphthongs, and hiatuses.

Unit II: Text and Utterance

• Objectives:
• Understand elements involved in linguistic communication.
• Consider suprasegmental features that contribute to meaning.
• Establish relationships between intonation, pauses, and punctuation.
• Reflect on the organization of text content.
• Understand the orthography of text (indentation, capitalization, letter formation).
• Use punctuation effectively.
• Content:
• Text and utterance: The utterance as a minimal unit of communication, context and situation, intonation, punctuation (period, ellipsis, question marks, exclamation marks).
• The text as a single or multiple utterances.
• Global meaning of the text: the theme or topic.

Unit III: Acts of Linguistic Communication

• Objectives:
• Recognize social acts performed through language use.
• Develop the ability to use appropriate forms of expression.
• Recognize the sender, receiver, and referent in a given text.
• Develop the necessary lexicon for expressing and supporting observations.
• Observe pronouns from a diachronic perspective.
• Content:
• Acts of linguistic communication: Speaker's intention (informing, requesting, promising, expressing desire, ordering, threatening), oral and written communication acts, the written communication situation (sender, receiver), resources marking sender-receiver alternation, the referent, words as referents, the utterance as a product of enunciation, variations in meaning, forms of address (tú, vos, usted, ustedes, vosotros).

Unit IV: The Verb and the Sentence

• Objectives:
• Observe the organization of discourse into sentence and non-sentence structures.
• Recognize the conjugated verb as the core of sentence relationships.
• Identify verb adjuncts as semantic and syntactic units.
• Content:
• The verb: Conjugation, morphology, radical and desinence, grammatical content expressed by the verb (person, number, tense, mood), the three conjugations, the indicative mood, simple and compound forms, present, past, and future tenses.
• The sentence: The verbal nucleus and its adjuncts, sentence utterance, non-sentence utterance.