Teaching for Oral Proficiency at the Elementary School Level

Abstract

In January 1983, the Board of Elementary and Secondary Education enacted the following requirement for the State of Louisiana: Beginning in Grade 4 in 1985-86 and extending to Grade 6 by 1987-88, an elementary foreign language program for 30 minutes every day shall be required for all academically able students.' The need for new textbooks and classroom materials was evident, and I became interested in developing a textbook for the fourth grade level. I have been teaching Spanish at Southern University at New Orleans for twenty years and have successfully taught the language to my four children. When the smaller children were age three, I worked on a Spanish tape for pre-schoolers. These experiences provided a suitable background to develop material for children. In order to ascertain its merits in a fourth grade class, I asked the principal at Resurrection of Our Lord School in New Orleans to allow me to teach Spanish to some of her students. She welcomed the idea with great enthusiasm. In 1984, I was assigned a fourth grade class of 28 students and was to meet with them twice a week for periods of forty minutes. The teaching conditions were excellent: (a) this fourth grade class was the accelerated group; (b) the teacher was very positive about the idea. She remained in the classroom and reviewed the lessons with the chil-