ABSTRACT
Language poses multiple problems for education because it is both curriculum content and learning environment, both the object of knowledge, and a medium through which other knowledge is acquired. Critical problems in designing such environments vary according to the age of the learner. For young children, consistency of adult-child relationships, distribution of adult talking time, and the character of the adult-child interaction seem to be important; for older children and adults, the problem of motivation probably overwhelms all others. Children learn to speak like the people important to them in their home community. On some nonconscious level, children pick their parents and later their peers as language models despite the fact that they listen, during long periods of watching television, to standard American patterns of pronunciation and grammar. Since language is the medium of instruction for most curriculum content, including itself, it is a large part of any learning environment.
