This Minnesota Curriculum Center report recounts the development of teaching materials on the nature and uses of language for grades 7-12 and presents the first of five seventh-grade units. A description of the origins, purposes, and personnel of the Center is followed by brief discussions of (1) the Center's underlying assumption that a study of language provides the organizing focus for an English curriculum, (2) the demonstration procedures of the Center, and (3) the individual units developed. The major portion of the report is comprised of the unit for grade 7 which establishes a definition of language and introduces the concept that language is a coded system of learned, conventional oral symbols. Lectures, inductive questions, exercises, and such materials as Helen Keller's autobiography and Lewis Carroll's "Through the Looking Glass" are used to help students perceive the basic characteristics of spoken language, its possible origins, its personal and social importance, how it is learned, and how it both resembles and differs from other coded systems and from communication among animals. (See also TE 001 261, TE 001 263-TE 001 273.) (JB)