Abstract:

In the era of globalization, the growth of interlinguistic exchanges raises the question of the efficiency of language teaching approaches to a point that has never been reached before. Whether exchanges are real (travel) or virtual (via the Internet and social messaging networks), there are more and more young people who want to speak foreign languages and to speak them well. Motivation seems to have moved from a simple desire to pass the school exams to a genuine desire to express (the) one’s self worldwide throughout the Global Village.

Therefore, education professionals are led to determine which kind of pedagogical innovations can respond to this acceleration of the need for communication skills in foreign languages. Of course, we find more and more technological innovations (incremental repetition algorithms, dynamic multimedia content) in our surroundings that can be of great help to reach many pedagogical goals. However, we need to consider whether we can delegate to a machine the task of truly developing the necessary skills of genuine communication between human beings. Can literacy really be achieved through an automated self-learning system?

Thinking over the results obtained in different teaching systems of FSL, such as the immersion versus the traditional classroom in Canada, educational specialists (C. Germain, J. Netten) started to consider the outcomes in terms of fluency and accuracy and then came to this question: how is it that there are so many students quite capable of success in their second-language school exams and yet remain unable to communicate spontaneously in this language, while there are so many other people who have no grammatical knowledge of this second language and who, conversely, use it with ease and spontaneity?

This sad situation has been for a long time observed by many language teachers, but nowadays, cognitive neuroscience findings reveal the underlying reasons for this difference in performance in each case. Taking this into consideration led to the birth of the Neurolinguistical Approach for teaching languages (NLA), a methodology that aims to take account of newly established neuroeducation principles of memory management, attention stimulation and cognitive implication to formulate teaching strategies.

Measuring its results with a proficiency scale, NLA proposes to found the teaching of foreign languages on a scientific methodological approach aiming at the development of communication skills through a pedagogy of literacy.

Acknowledgements:
The authors implement the comparative analysis and other empiric methods of quantitative estimation. The publication has been prepared with the support of the RUDN University Program 5-100.

Keywords:

Neuroeducation, neuroscience, neurolinguistics, neurocognitive, NLA, ESL, FSL, neurolinguistics approach for teaching foreign languages, innovation technics.