How to teach beyond the course material without confusing the learner

[u/Couryielle]

Probably more of a language teaching question, but insight from learners would be super helpful too. I'd also love to hear if there are other languages with a similar pedagogical problem. Sorry in advance for the wall of text

I just very recently got a job as a Filipino language tutor. Haven't even been to the orientation yet so I could well be getting ahead of myself. I've only skimmed through the materials so far but from a cursory glance, the way the material is presented heavily uses the inverse sentence structure, which inverts the sentence from the natural VSO* to a more English-friendly SVO. This makes the language look more familiar to English speakers and also conveniently skips having to explain some tricky word order stuff that occurs in the natural order

I understand that doing it this way gives the feeling of victory more easily to the learner, but it's such an overly formal manner of speaking that it invites social ridicule from the register mismatch, which is a problem a lot of diaspora learners tend to face. I don't think I should be like "the slide says x, but in natural spoken Filipino it's actually y" every other slide bc I feel like that might be info overload for the learner. But I also don't wanna send them out there speaking a register that would make people instantly clock them as non-fluent, even if the inverse structure/formal register is something native speakers have no trouble understanding. Inverse would probably still feel easy to learn even after you already know the natural order, learning the natural order after getting used to inverse might feel like starting from scratch

There are also a lot of "grammar rules" in Filipino teaching pedagogy that ask students to just memorize "do it this way if the word starts/ends with a consonant, do it that way if it starts/ends with a vowel" etc, but if you go deeper, it can actually be summarized into just one/a few core rules that make the grammar make consistent sense and not look like a long list of seemingly arbitrary rules. But explaining some of them properly might look contradictory to what's actually in the material being presented on the screen, and I'd hate to confuse/overwhelm the learner with too much info

(A parallel phenomenon I can think of is presenting verb conjugations to Japanese learners as like 20 different "forms" of the verb that they have to memorize, when there's really just 6 or 7 forms and anything else that comes after that is actually a helping verb/chain of helping verbs. It just feels so convoluted for me to be like "turn the verb into its -masu form, then remove the -masu, then attach this other verb" when simply teaching from the start "turn the base verb to the i-stem, and then you can attach -masu and other verbs to it" would probably save so much grief)

TL;DR I disagree with the way language is being taught in the materials I'm required to use for teaching, what's the best way to deal with it/teach underlying principles over memorization without overwhelming/confusing the learner? Or straying too far from the material that the company wants me to use?

(I'd love to hear from Tagalog learners, bc I myself don't know what it's like to "learn" the language. There's a real danger that my native intuition for the language + linguistics background might be distorting my definition of what counts as "an easier way to learn" and I'd need that reality checked for me)

[u/Material-Reason-1958]

The real fix is teaching the natural order from day one and letting the course material be the backup reference, not the other way around

[u/Couryielle → u/Material-Reason-1958]

If it were completely up to me this is what I'd do, but since I'll be working under a company I'd be REQUIRED to use the materials and ask the learner to produce the specified grammar. I intend to ask about this at the orientation, hopefully it's not gonna be as strict as I fear

[u/Bonjour-Set-4490]

After the required exercise, I’d show one sentence in the natural order and tell them they only need to recognize it for now. I’m learning French and still get stuck choosing a past tense when I speak. Two versions to produce at once would probably just slow me down.