On the first day of the Accelerated Learning course, the trainer started the session by asking the trainees this question, and after discussing the possible answers with them, the answer that the trainer later gave was “Language”. What an intuitive answer! But how does the brain learn language? And what is the real addition that a learning model like Lozanov's method makes to learning theories?
In this article, we review Lozanov’s experiment and the findings of his study, then we compare the principles on which traditional learning was based and the principles and foundations upon which Accelerated Learning is based. In the last part, we discuss the opinion of modern science on the way the brain interacts with language learning from birth to school age.
1. The Learning Equation:
We cannot talk about the learning process without going back to the brain and its functions and the mechanism it uses in perceiving and interacting with the surrounding environment. We must address a number of terms that the brain uses in learning processes:
Perception:
A process that takes place in the brain, and it means becoming aware of something through the senses, then making sense of it bio-chemically inside the brain in a temporary fashion parallel to what is called short-term memory (temporary perception), or a long-term fashion (long-term perception).
Intelligence:
It is the result of perception, and a behavioral indicator of it. It is the effective force for learning and success in achieving hopes and desires, and the ability to solve problems, understand intuitions, and produce reflective thoughts.
Scientists view learning as a psychological concept that occurs as a result of changes in the cognitive structure of the individual, and its presence is usually inferred by visible behavioral indicators in school or social life.
Learning occurs when the individual is exposed to sensory experiences in the surrounding environment, where the sensation – seeing, smelling, hearing, tasting, and touching – is transmitted through the secondary nervous system to the brain, whose cells receive nervous stimuli as a result of perception, causing learning to take place.
And because learning is the only means for the individual growth of the personality in its various aspects and its psychological, physical, and behavioral needs, the knowledge and experiences to which the individual is exposed must be appropriate to the content of their cognitive structure or intelligence cognitive abilities.
Describing the interaction between thought and language, Vygotsky says: “The miracle of human cognition is that both of these systems use the same linguistic code; therefore, one can be translated into the other with a certain degree of success."
Based on all of the above, we can say that learning is universally viewed as the product of cognition and intelligence, where cognition is used as a linguistic code to interact with the surrounding environment; therefore, the learning equation is “perception + intelligence = learning".
2. How the brain interacts with the process of learning language:
The brain: The brain is a part of the central nervous system that works to regulate most of the body’s actions, starting from vital functions such as breathing and regulating heartbeats, to higher functions such as thinking, remembering, and speaking. Some of the primary tasks that it constantly performs are perception and learning as an important part of understanding our relationship with the world around us.
Language: Language is a system of symbols and signs that ultimately constitute one of the tools of knowledge, and it is one of the most important means of understanding and communicating in various fields of life between individuals in society, without which the cognitive activity of individuals is impossible.
It is important to point out that there is a special branch of science related to the study of the brain called “neurolinguistics”, which is a branch of neuroscience and cognitive science that is concerned with the study of the three neurological phenomena that control language or are related to it:
- Language understanding.
- Language production.
- Language acquisition.
This science indicates through the first studies carried out by the French surgeon Paul Broca and Carl Wernicke at the beginning of the nineteenth century that language is one of the functions of the left hemisphere, and that speech production takes place precisely in “Broca’s area”, which is located in the frontal lobe of the brain. The function of this area is to maintain a list of words and word parts that are used to produce speech and its meanings (in other words, to assign meanings to the vocabulary we use). In addition to controlling spoken speech, this area controls written speech, and it is responsible for the production of sign language. Thus, the role of this area is related to pronunciation, expression, and motor production of speech.
Paul Broca and Carl Wernicke:
In addition, there’s another area in the brain that is associated with the Broca’s area, called Wernicke’s area, which is located in the non-dominant hemisphere, and its function is to understand language and non-verbal sounds such as those of machines, noises, and animals, and to comprehend metaphors, patterns of tone and intonation, and verse meters.
Broca and Wernicke were seeking to understand the relationship between brain damage and language disorders. They concluded from their experiments that language is a regional function specific to regions, centers, or locations in the brain.
However, new studies conducted in the last decade of the twenty-first century revealed that language is not limited to a region of the brain, and it is not confined to a specific hemisphere. Rather, the brain grows when we learn new languages. This indicates that the regional view of the brain’s interaction with language learning has changed, and it is now thought that language learning happens through multiple functions performed by various regions of the brain working together.
To understand how the brain interacts with language, we need to take a broader look at the mechanism by which the brain learns language in the first years of human life. Linguists divide the course of language development in children into three different yet interrelated levels, namely the phonetic, lexical, and grammatical levels.
1. At the phonetic level:
Studies found that newborns are able to hear and distinguish phonetics. During their first year, the infant learns distinct sound patterns for the set of sound signals that they hear every day. These sound patterns guide the brain’s perception of sounds and their classification.
For example, a child responds to the sound of their name when called by the mother differently than they respond to being called by a stranger, such as the family doctor, as the infant makes a dictionary of sounds in the first year of their life, which helps them later pronounce their first word.
Accordingly, it is believed that the sounds the child makes before 6 months of age are nothing but noises and cries that do not resemble speech.
At this stage, the infant tests the abilities of their speech tract (The speech organs are the organs responsible for producing speech, and they are divided into two groups: the fixed vocal organs and the mobile vocal organs. The fixed organs include the teeth, upper jaw, gums, the back wall of the throat and the nose, while the mobile organs include the lips, tongue, plate, lower jaw, uvula, larynx, vocal chords, lungs, and diaphragm). Between the 6th to 10th month, infants begin the stage of babbling, where they make repeated syllables of sounds, and they use the same sounds and syllables at the end of their first year to pronounce their first word. For example, the child repeats the syllable for the letter (P) in the stage of babbling, and ends up using it to pronounce the word (Papa) in their first year.
The babbling stage is an important stage for the infant as they discover the relationship between what their vocal tract is doing and the sounds coming from it. Therefore, it is necessary to interact with the infant at this stage.
By the time the child completes 18 months, their brain would have formed a mental system to represent the sounds of the mother tongue they hear, and they re-produce them within the limitations of their mental abilities. It should be noted that it all depends on the language that the child hears at this stage in which the production of sounds becomes consistent across different words. This is because their mind builds phonological symmetries and establishes a sound system for vocabulary that develops later with time and systematic education. Scholars warn against exposing the child to more than one language or dialect because it will create a dictionary of confusing sounds, which subsequently affects the development of their ability to pronounce and learn the mother tongue.
2. At the lexical level:
Studies show that a child understands their first word at the age of no more than 5 months, and produces their first words between the 10th to 15th month. They are able to produce 50 words by the age of a year and a half, and 100 words at the end of their second year. The development of their word formation accelerates to reach 14,000 words at 6 years old. At this stage, the child's phonemic memory works along with other parts of the brain to learn words. The word (apple) for example has more than one syllable. The child’s brain begins to track the groups of these syllables appearing together (one word), and at the same time it works to divide the continuous stream of speech into separate words. If they are encountering the word for the first time, they resort to an external inference mechanism that depends on the social dimension (such as asking an adult about the meaning of this word) or the perceptual comprehension mechanism (such as linking the word with preconceived notions, linking apples to something that is eaten or that it is a fruit). Thus, we find that creating a dictionary of words is closely related to the dictionary of sounds that they created for a specific language (mother tongue) in their early days, and the more experiences a child is exposed to, the larger the size of their dictionary of words is.
3. At the grammatical level:
After the child is about two years old, they begin to put two or more words into a short sentence that is devoid of functional words such as prepositions, and that lacks plural forms and temporal variety. The child masters the rules of their language through trial and error, and becomes able to produce longer sentences that are grammatically complete, and their sentences grow longer long before they reach their second year until the end of their fourth year. At this stage, the more varied and intense the linguistic diversity that the child is exposed to, the more they master the rules of their mother tongue, and the more their brain is prepared with an innate-acquired knowledge about the structure of language. This basic knowledge facilitates learning to read and write in school. Studies of the development of a child’s linguistic structure indicate that children who hear more speech and more structurally complex language acquire grammar faster than children with less experience. Also, the development of language is not related to the type of language or ethnicity, as the learning mechanisms are the same, which indicates the existence of a biological basis for the language learning process.
This is the mechanism suggested by scientists to explain the infant’s ability to acquire language without any teacher or indoctrination, and it clearly indicates that these levels work to stimulate both the right and left hemispheres of the brain. Moreover, a study published in 2015 indicated that the more closely aligned the neurons are in the white matter — a brain tissue made up of millions of nerve fibers, or axons, which connect neurons together — in the right part of the brain, the better and faster the person’s ability is to learn. The role of the right hemisphere in distinguishing and perceiving the different pitches and tones of language is believed to be strong in the early stages of a child’s life.
Although there have been hundreds of studies on the topic, describing the neural basis of language and speech remains difficult.
Brain functions:
The previous figure illustrates the functions of the brain, and the colors in the figure indicate the different areas of the brain that interact with language, whether in speaking, listening, writing, or even signing in both the state of production or reception of language.
Areas in the frontal and parietal lobes form what you want to say, while the motor cortex in the frontal lobe gives you the ability to say words. It’s possible that most of the brain activity associated with language – especially the grammatical aspect – occurs on the left side of your brain.
Modern brain imaging methods have revealed that many regions in each of the main lobes (frontal, parietal, occipital, temporal lobes, and the cerebellum) are involved in our ability to produce and understand language.
3. Lozanov and Super Learning:
Georgi Lozanov, a Bulgarian psychologist, used a different approach to dealing with mental patients in his clinic, through which he was able to reach something in the depths of the mind that simple awareness and alertness could not reach. In his approach, he presented positive ideas about healing, using Baroque music at the same time to calm down his patients while they were in his office.
Lozanov tested this approach in his model of learning acceleration, and he carried out his well-known experiment (the results of which he later published) on 416 students from Sophia University to learn 1,600 words in French during 23 school days, and the results came as follows:
- 88 percent of learners learned more than 86% of the words.
- 12 percent of learners learned 50% to 85% of the words.
- The correct recall rate for the words the learners had memorized was 93%.
What an amazing result! To learn such a large number of words in a short time in a foreign language that you are learning for the first time is not an ordinary matter. If you knew that what experts believed about learning a new language could not exceed 7 words per hour – which is equivalent to 160 words during 23 school days – you would have found this astonishing, no?
This experiment showed that the learning speed can be multiplied 10 times, contrary to what was believed, and the successive results that were conducted on the same sample to test the percentage of information retention after the end of the study showed the following:
- The original correct recall rate was 93%.
- After 6 months, it was 88%.
- After 9 months it was 85%.
- After 12 months, it was 67%, and when the group was given the opportunity to perform a one-time review, it was 79%.
What amazing results to retain so much information even after a year of learning! It is worth noting here that the ability to recall measured by the study means that the student must remember the meaning of each word they have learned, and be able to use it correctly in a sentence.
In his book “Super Learning”, Lozanov presented the accelerated learning model in a simple equation with an elaborate mixture of Baroque music, positive suggestions, and children’s games, all of which speed up the learning process. Accelerated learning uses the power of positive suggestion during the learning process to double the ability to memorize information and retain it (remember and use it) for a longer period. The main goal of teaching in a positive way is not only memorization, but rather the pursuit of deep understanding and creative solutions to problems by taking the learner’s thinking to new heights.
What Lozanov presented in his equation for accelerated learning as a result of his experiment was a surprising addition to studies of learning, as learning was seen before his experiment as a purely mental matter related to perception, logic, and pronunciation, and these are functions that were known at the time to be monopolized by the left side of the brain. However, Lozanov had another opinion, which is that learning depends on both the mind and the body, and it includes emotions and sensations, which are some of the functions of the right side of the brain. Thus, he concluded that learning is a comprehensive process that is not confined to a specific part of the brain, and it doesn’t lack the interaction of the body and emotion. His equation for learning was (perception + intelligence + body + emotion = learning).
Now you can see why Lozanov described accelerated learning as a “natural” learning, as his equation relies on immersion of the entire brain in the learning process, just how children get immersed in playing. They indulge their minds, hearts, and bodies when playing, and what they do in fact is learn quickly about themselves, others, and their surrounding world.
This basic principle of learning leads us to another principle presented by Lozanov through his experience, which is that learning takes place on several levels at the same time, contrary to what was previously rumored that learning is a conscious absorption of parts of knowledge in a sequential and linear manner.
Contrary to what was shown in Lozanov’s experiment, we found that the learning process can contain a range of things at once. Through his simple equation, Lozanov was able to introduce learners to several levels of themselves at once, starting from the conscious and unconscious level through the different senses, all the way to the brain and body; hence, the learning equation was developed to become as follows: (perception + intelligence + body + emotion = learning at the conscious and unconscious level).
Thus, we can say that Lozanov made new assumptions on the way the brain learns and interacts with its internal and external surroundings, and proved the validity of these assumptions through his experiment.
Conclusion:
The brain has potentials that we are still ignorant of today, and sticking to an old idea or a specific theory hinders our abilities as human beings to discover these potentials and benefit from them in developing learning and education in a way that suits how the brain was made to help us perceive and learn about our external and internal environment.
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