Connecting Neuroscience and ELT: What we learned in 2013
Robert Murphy, Rick Eller, Zack Robertson, Joe Simpson
After telling us about the recent neurolinguistic conferences in Quito and Boston, Murphy introduced a list of 42 maxims that have been synthesized with colleagues (http://fab-efl.com/) from hundreds of books and scientific articles in and around the fields of neuroscience, psychology, and education, which he invited us to consider and connect for better EFL teaching in our classes.
Simpson followed with extensions on numbers 20 and 21, discussing the various effects of sleep upon our brains, which is beneficial for learning in general, and some specific ways that it is good for language learning in particular. Because, according to the first maxim, emotion drives learning, Eller begins his children's classes with pictures, the wilder the better. He explained how positive and negative experiences throughout a lifetime uniquely shape our emotions and how tapping into them can be fruitfully exploited. Robertson noted that our thinking processes have evolved to anticipate things before they happen, as a survival mechanism, and that they filter out mundane or irrelevant stimuli and how that can be exploited for language teaching.
Our interest and imaginations piqued, Murphy then organized discussion in small groups of new collective insights and changes that might be effected in our teaching.
Link to meeting listing

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