A Document-Thinking Teaching Framework for LaTeX: Why Syntax Belongs in the Appendix

LaTeX is conventionally taught as a markup language whose primary content is the syntax of commands, environments, packages, and parameters. Vietnamese-language LaTeX instruction inherited this orientation from international templates, including the canonical Vietnamese baseline (Nguyễn Thái Sơn 2010). The result is a documented failure mode in which learners can typeset a single sample document but cannot author a new one without re-typing the sample, cannot debug their own structure, and cannot transfer skill across document classes. This paper argues that the failure mode is structural: it is caused by foregrounding syntax — which is extraneous cognitive load in the Sweller sense — at the moment the learner has not yet acquired the document-thinking primitives that syntax serves. We synthesise the LaTeX literature (Lamport 1986/1994; Knuth 1984; Mittelbach et al. 2023 The LaTeX Companion 3e; Goossens et al. 2007; Oetiker et al. 2024; the l3kernel/expl3, KOMAScript, and memoir documentation) with cognitive-load theory (Sweller, van Merriënboer, Paas 2019) and desirable-difficulty pedagogy (Bjork modernised tooling is out of scope (deferred to H4.2).