The idea of progression in designing the curriculum of Romanian as a foreign language (RFL). Although it constitutes a constant reality in teaching foreign languages and, even more, in the process of designing the curriculum, the idea of progression has been, in turn, glorified, marginalised or even crucified by didacticians, especially during the heyday of the communicative methods and the action-perspective on teaching. Lately, the theoretical debates from the outside medium have been trying to rehabilitate it, starting from the idea that a natural language is, practically, infinite and that, in the didactic context, it is required to find an “end” in order to establish accurately the fundamental reference points for a teaching-learning-evaluating path that is as efficient as possible. In the case of the RFL, grammatical progression has remained a central point of interest for specialists for over three decades. However, the echoes of communicative methods, though perceptively diminished in intensity in the Western world, have lately determined them to increasingly favour communicativeness and authenticity, at least at the declarative level, considering that in this way they will guarantee the “modernity” of the discourse. Yet, the resurrection of enthusiasm for the two concepts has sometimes led to exaggerated attitudes that disapproved of the proposals of progressive description and organisation of the teaching contents, because of too rigid and inadequate an understanding of the notion of progression. In our study, we intend to sensitise Romanian specialists to the need of looking at the idea of progression with more flexibility, without which designing a didactic process that is coherently articulated is inconceivable, especially in the first stages of RFL acquisition and, especially, when one does not resort to any other contact language while teaching it.

Keywords: Romanian as a foreign language, progression, macro-progression, micro-progression, inter-language, micro-language, input, intake, output, curriculum.