Final Reflections

1.In what ways can neuroscience help you as an ELT teacher?
NEUROSCIENCE: “USE IT OR LOSE IT”
Teaching English is a constant challenge which leads us to wonder what surprises we will encounter ever time we enter the classroom. We ask ourselves what is in the students’ minds whenever our expectations do not meet the students’ response. It seems to be a consensus that Neuroscience has the answer to our inquiry due to its applicability to language instruction in both regular classes and those in which we get learners with physical disabilities. Neuroscience helps us train ourselves to do things in new ways (like with PEG exercises), and become more confident to teach the same routines and learning strategies to others, especially when teaching a foreign language. The brain can be not only trained, but also stimulated (and over stimulated) through the senses, no matter the students’ age or level of English. Why not create learning activities in which students get to see, smell, taste, touch, and talk? These and other ritualized scenarios can improve students’ retention.
It would be naïve to think that the brain is not connected to learning, and to our ultimate goal: acquisition or that teaching only happens in the classroom. Students’ physical constraints brain functions, hormones, nervous system, emotions, and affective filter, are all connected to the way students learn, and every individual is different. How can we deal with so many variables? Neuroscience provides us with a tool to professionalize our work, understand how students actually learn, and modify the teaching strategies we have always used (the input of Neuroscience to teaching). Researchers mention the fact that our brain can change, and the way I see it is like training a muscle: the more you exercise it, the more it will remember the routine. Just as people say: “Use it or lose it”

2.Accelerated language instruction is based on 8 main components. Why is it important to try and touch on all of them in class?
Accelerated learning has proven successful given its practical nature. He refers to it as the different techniques, methodologies, and approaches to language teaching. Making use of each and evey one of them in our classes will assure a better learning environment for our students. Anderson has identified the following eight components:
1. Learning environment: room color, furniture, temperature, background music, smell, and textures, and decoration. Through the use of senses, students’ perception will be awakened, and their retention will take concepts to the long-term memory.
2. The state setting: the mood/atmosphere the teacher wishes to create, and even unpredictability. In a nice setting, students get the willingness the y need to start accepting the new information that their brains will learn more smoothly, and fears associated to language learning will start to disappear, especially when teaching older adults.
3. Mnemonics: memory creative techniques when first introducing a new topic, like by having fun, relaxing, and allowing a free-flowing learning environment. Before students face grammatical structures in a second language, it is advisable to bombard students with techniques to acquire hundreds of words so that at the moment of producing more complex sentences beyond the basic survival level, they can feel more confident.
4. Over-stimulation: (like Brunner’s ritualized scenario) reinforcement, repetition, bombarding, and taking into account students’ interests (people can assimilate usually more than 80% info than we assume). We must not teach for the moment but for their lives, and if we provide them with the opportunity to find new concepts in different contexts, they will retain more.
5. Pattern-spotting and learning in broad strokes: learning a lot in a little time, over generalizing rules effectively and gaining confidence. This process requires the teacher’s guidance at the beginning levels. Once students learn how to differentiate L1 and L2 patterns, they will be able to do so on their own.
6. Howard Gardner’s Multiple Intelligence: planning class activities that activate other types of intelligences, rather than the only ones that seem dominant in a student (practical application: games, colors, textures, realia).
7. Use of chunking: teaching should not be like a black hole of information in which everything collapses, but information should be broken into pieces or chunks so that students understand and retain information better.
8. Objective setting: when students know the objectives of what they will learn, which leads to a higher sense of achievement (practical application: writing the teacher’s objectives on the board).

3.Anderson´s ACT-R concept proposes modularization and buffering of learning. How can this be applied in ELT?
Anderson began to study language from a neuroscientific and cognitive perspective. His biggest contribution to the field of Language teaching is his Act Theory of Cognition, which states that learning takes place in modules or “ACT’s” (Adaptive Control of Thought).
He also distinguishes three types of memory: the short-time memory structures: the declarative one (semantic nets, propositions, images, and images), the procedural one (inferences from background information and factual knowledge), and the working memory, which is higly activated at the moment of events.
Through stimuli, teachers can attemtp to send newly taught material to the students’ short-term memory (which stores information for less than a minute), and from there to their long-term memory (which lasts days, months or even years). I believe that this is really possible by planning lcasses that are unforgettable to students; classes that require their logical thinking, their transfer of information, and the use of their senses.
As to English language teaching, the ACT’s theory is applicable at many levels. For instance, at the moment of introducing very basic vocabulary and functional phrases in elementary levels, the teacher must provide students with enough lexical input so that they can achieve their goals little by little. It is only through practice that students will get the mastery of a little chunk of language, followed by another, and repeating this process incessantly. A teacher can foster the Anderson’s theory by helping students make the right lexical and structural generalizations from class topics, discriminate what makes some aspects of L1 different from L2 (and rely on the commonalities), share class aims with students and even negotiate some with them so they feel engaged, and always bring variety to the classroom. If taught in chunks, students will be more likely to succeed, and fewer clients will drop off from our classes.

4.Chomsky, Brunner, Krashen, Anderson, Macnamara: What contributions from these authors will you follow as an English teacher?
NOTE: due to time constraints, I will mention the ones every author posed, and I will underline the ones I mostly agree with (most have been already explained in my blog)
Chomsky: Innatism, generative grammar, and universals. According to him, language acquisition began when we started using Infinite numerical computational skills (when humans began to count), skills (rules), and parameters (options). THE BIGGEST CONTRIBUTION BY CHOMSKY: computational skills. I agree with the recursiveness we acquire, and I think that through constant practice, we can train our students to do the same in L2.
Brunner: “LASS” (Language Acquisition Support System). I can say that every LAD needs his LASS because we should have a natural disposition (we are biologically capable to produce lang), but interaction with the family is a must -nurture-, and the context helps us learn, apart from the Ritualized scenarios: being passive at first, and active if the situation is emotionally charged in context. According to Brunner, interaction and reinforcement are a must when teaching languages, and I totally agree with him because context reinforces the concepts students learn.
Krashen: his theory of L2 acquisition does not have to do with learning rules and structures, but with meaningful interaction in context, and it is based on ...
- Acquisition-learning hypothesis: there are two systems of language performance... the aqcuired one (through meaningful/ natural communication - subconscious process) and the learned one (through error correction, explicit instruction – formal conscious process).
- Monitor hypothesis: once the conditions of time, form, and rule are clear to students, they can monitor and edit their sentences, correct their mistakes, and plan how not to make the same mistakes again. I believe that as studetns reach a higher level of English, they are able to monitor themselves more and more effectively.
- Natural order hypothesis: there is a natural order for learning an L2 language that differs form L1 order. Students are taught by stages just the way we teach verb tenses at schools as their level of difficulty increases: To Be, Present progressive, simple present, simple past, future, and so on. However, Krashen rejects grammatical sequencing because the goal is language acquisition.
- Input hypothesis: L+1. Giving students a little difficulty instruction a bit above the average level of the class, will benefit their learning of a second language.
- Affective filter: how a student feels about himself and his class will affect his learning in a positive or negative way. This is one of my biggest goals this year: motivation in class.

Anderson –and other theorists- conceived the ACT-R (Adaptive control of thought), which has to do with computational skills. He developed a cognitive architecture not only to explain how people remember and manage cognition, but also to recreate it on computation. ACT-R implies knowledge:
He introduces chunks, which are inside modules, which are accessible only through Buffers –specialized and independent brain structures at the front and the end of modules. If the buffers don’t work, we can’t continue learning. The modules produce cognition. When cognitive tasks are given –like picture object- and language starts to evolve. With modules we can see step by step simulation for human behavior.
Mc Namara: No need for LAD because we make sense of the input. He talked about the ability people have for intention-reading and for understanding that intonation has a connection with what a person really means beyond words (like Tomasello). I agree with this theory and it is something that I always emphasize in my classes with advanced students because after they master the language in a pretty acceptable way, they can enjoy the richness of pragmatics and intentiosn in verbal and written texts.

5.In what ways has this course inspired you to innovate on your professional practice?
The most important contribution of this class was something that I will never forget: memory! The way mnemonic techniques were introduced to us made tasks seem fruitful only after a trial and error process. I started using the techniques immediately with my students, and I will keep observing the results form the mini experiments I have started to carry out. After all, mnemonics is one of the main topics of my research project.
The second contribution has been the intensive reinforcement of theories by a veriety of authors. Not only through presentations, but also through lots of visual aids, I finally feel that I have consolidated all those dusty concepts that had been resting in my head since I graduated from my university more than a decade ago. This course allowed me to refresh some ideas and to see the application of updated ICT’s that I had not even though of. I saw the application of every single concept to my own classes, and this is too much to say as a professional. It is more that what I usually got in other classes. I have even felt motivated to start working with music in my class (classical music) and I will soon be investigating how alpha waves work. Now I know that this process with memory and other methodologies should not stop. As I said after my first weekend in this module: it was all worth it.