Teaching Children
Popular tradition would have you believe that children are effortless second language learners and far superior to adults in their eventual success. On both counts, some qualifications are in order. First of all, children's widespread success in acquiring second languages belies a tremendous subconscious effort devoted to the task. As you have discovered in other reading (see PLLT, Chapters 2 and 3, for example) children exercise a good deal of both cognitive and affective effort in order to internalize both native and second languages. The difference between children and adults (that is, persons beyond the age of puberty) lies primarily in the contrast between the child's spontaneous, peripheral attention to language forms and the adult's overt, focal awareness and attention to those forms. Therefore, the popular notion about children holds only if "effort" refers, rather narrowly, to focal attention (sometimes thought of as "conscious" attention-see Chapter 11 of PLLT) to language forms.

Nor are adults necessarily less successful in their efforts. Studies have shown that adults, in fact, can be superior in a number of aspects of acquisition. They can learn and retain a larger vocabulary. They can utilize various deductive and abstract processes to shortcut the learning of grammatical and other linguistic concepts. And, in classroom learning, their superior intellect usually helps them to learn faster than a child. So, while children, with their fluency and naturalness, are often the envy of adults struggling with second languages, children in classrooms may have some difficulties learning a second language.
Third, the popular claim fails to differentiate very young children from pre-pubescent children and the whole range of ages in between. There are actually many instances of older (school-age) children manifesting significant difficulty in acquiring a second language for a multitude of reasons. Ranking high on that list of reasons are a number of complex personal, social, cultural, and political factors at play in elementary school teaching of second languages.
Teaching ESL to school-age children, therefore, is not merely a matter of setting them loose on a plethora of authentic language tasks in the classroom. To successfully teach children a second language requires specific skills and intuitions that differ from those that you would use for adult teaching. Five categories may help to give you some practical approaches to teaching children.
1. Intellectual development

An elementary school teacher once asked her students to take out a piece of paper and pencil and write something. A little boy raised his hand, "Teacher, I ain't got no pencil." The teacher, somewhat perturbed by his grammar, embarked on a barrage of corrective patterns: "I don't have a pencil. You don't have a pencil. We don't have pencils." Confused and bewildered, the child responded, "Ain't nobody got no pencils?"
Since children (up to the age of about eleven) are still in an intellectual stage of what Piaget called concrete operations," you need to remember their limitations. Rules, explanations, and other even slightly abstract talk about language must be approached with extreme caution. Children are centered on the "here and now," on the functional purposes of language. They have little appreciation for our adult notions of "correctness," and they certainly cannot grasp the metalanguage we use to describe and explain linguistic concepts. Some rules of thumb for your classroom:
•Don't explain grammar using terms like "present progressive" or "relative clause."
•Rules that are stated in abstract terms ("To make a statement into a question, you add a 'do' or 'does'") should be avoided.
•Some grammatical concepts, especially at the upper levels of childhood, can be called to learners' attention by showing them certain patterns ("Notice the 'ing' at the end of the word.") and examples ("This is the way we say it when it's happening right now: 'I'm walking to the door.')
•Certain more difficult concepts or patterns require more repetition than adults need. For example, repeating certain patterns (without boring them) may be necessary to get the brain and the ear to cooperate. Unlike the scene with the little boy who had no pencil, children must understand the meaning and relevance of repetitions.