Neuroscience in ELT

the brain sees with its ears and touch, and hears with its eyes.

as primates, we are predominantly processors of visual information.

Eating does not engage just taste, but smell, tactile (inside the mouth), auditory and visual sensations

Learning a language, and the practice of it, requires the coordinated use of visual, auditory and kinaesthetic modalities, in addition to memory, emotion, will, thinking and imagination

There is indeed such a neural concourse, in the parieto-temporo-occipital ‘association’ cortex in each cerebral hemisphere

Fortunately, many teachers have not been taken in. Ironically, VAK has become, in the hands of practitioners, a recipe for a mixed-modality pedagogy where lessons have explicit presentations of material in V, A and K modes. Teachers quickly observed that their pupils' so-called learning styles were not stable, that the expressions of V-, A- and K-ness varied with the demands of the lessons, as they should

extrapolations from the lab to the classroom need to be made with considerable caution

The coloured blobs on brain maps representing areas of significant activation (so-called ‘lighting up’) are like the peaks of sub-oceanic mountains which rise above sea level

considerable complexity.

(fMRI),

the images are the end-result of many years' work on understanding the quantum mechanics of nuclear magnetic resonance phenomena, the development of the engineering of superconducting magnets, the application of inverse fast Fourier transforms to large data sets and the refinement of high-speed computing hardware and software to analyse large data sets across multiple parameters.

these neural contributions to intelligence are necessary for all school subjects, and all other aspects of cognition

no individual modules in the brain which correspond directly to the school curriculum

Neuromyths typically ignore such interconnectivity in their pursuit of simplicity

We tend to understand ourselves through our inventions

Further study revealed that the FOXP2 gene is relevant to multiple mental abilities and is not strictly a language gene at all.

The same gene that regulated language so strongly also regulated other mental faculties, so its very existence appeared to contradict rather than strengthen the idea that language commands its own territory separate from other areas of the brain.

the language-as-island idea is also inconsistent with the way evolution typically works. “What I don’t like about the ‘module’ is the idea that it evolved from scratch somehow. In my view, it’s more that existing neural circuits have been adapted for language and speech.

-month-old babies show activation in a number of different brain regions when they hear speech, inclu

ding in the cerebellum, which is important for coordinating motor movements

The problem with ‘gene for x’ or ‘grammar module y’ is they ignore how something that is the property of an individual is linked to something that is the property of a community

language is a distributed object

across the human brain and across generations of people