You learned your native language in the following sequence:

1. As an infant, you began by listening to your parents' words presented in an observable context. They talked to you about things you could see, feel, hear, touch or taste and you gradually associated certain sounds, which were words, with those actions, objects or descriptions.
   
   
2. After a few months, you began to associate certain sounds that your parents made with sensations you experienced. While in your crib, for example, you would hear them say: "Do you want to get up?" Every time after you heard the sound of the words "get up", you would experience the pleasant, reassuring experience of being picked up and held in their arms. As you associated those sounds with that experience, over time you began to imitate those sounds in order to stimulate the response you wanted from your parents. Imperfect though they may have been, those first efforts at speech delighted your parents.
   
   
3. Throughout the first four years of your life, you extended your oral vocabulary through the input of family, friends, television, radio, etc.
   
   
4. By the age of 5, you were able to speak English with total fluency, though with a limited vocabulary and not without some grammatical errors. Only at that point, and after you had received some phonics instruction, were you ready to begin to read.
   
   
5. Able to speak fluently and having seen words in print through extensive elementary reading, you were finally ready to write.

   These were the steps to your successful mastery of English - LISTENING, SPEAKING, VOCABULARY EXTENSION, READING and WRITING - in that order! Thanks to the ULAT's design, unless your instructor chooses to pursue an modified sequence to the ULAT's activities, they will be essentially the same steps in your successful acquisition of a second language. In the vast majority of cases, for a number of unfortunate reasons, traditional language instruction does NOT respect this natural sequence, but rather stands the language learning process "on its head", and student frustration, failure and resultant disinterest are inevitable.