Children's Learning and the Design of English Language Teaching Programs

Abstract

When I began teaching English to Spanish-speaking elementary school children in the mid 1960's, I received a set of English language teaching materials that reflected the view that language learning was habit formation, the learning of new patterns to replace the old ones that the children already had. The materials had been developed by well known applied linguists who previously had worked with adults. Emphasis in the lessons was on the repetition and memorization of a limited number of sentence patterns.