THE BILINGUAL BRAIN

THE BILINGUAL BRAIN

Along the history, scholars, philosophers, and psychologists, among others, have tried to find the method and/or strategies that will allow us to achieve good results in the teaching-learning process of a second language. In this way have been carried out studies that seek to provide an explanation to the functioning of the brain and thus design methods in line with brain activity.

According to research has been able to observe through magnetic resonance that learning a foreign language in children and adults, varies, modifying the way how the brain works.

Considering the brain as the most complex organ in the human body, carefully structured to perform specific functions, we recognize of great importance in the learning of the native language and foreign  languaje, the Brocca’s area, which is responsible for the production of grammatical sentences, and Wernicke's area, which is responsible for the information’s processing.

The first area of language within the left hemisphere is Brocca’s area, discovered by Paul Brocca, who studied the zone while he was analyzing patients with aphasia, a language disorder. Broca's area doesn't just handle getting language out in a motor sense, though. It seems to be more generally involved in the ability to process grammar itself, at least the more complex aspects of grammar.

The second language area to be discovered is called Wernicke's area, after Carl Wernicke, a German neurologist who discovered the area while studying patients who had similar symptoms to Broca's area patients but damage to a different part of their brain. This area emphasizes the oral performance.

In this way is evidence that both the people who learn a second language from children as those who learn when they are adults, used in the same way the  Wernicke’s area (responsible for processing the information and meanings), regardless of whether they speak in their first and foreign languages. But the Brocca's area, which was responsible for controlling oral production, which is analyzed in people who have learned the second language as children, using the same region of the Brocca's area, to speak in both languages, on the other hand, people who learn a second language when adults, use a special part and different from the part of the Brocca's area for your second language, near the activated by its native language.

Taking into account the above, we can say that the learning of foreign languages, i.e. the development of language skills is a human aptitude, present in people with cognitive capacities eminently normal, through which they develop skills to communicate effectively.  In this way you can use different strategies that favor the learning, considering the development of the Linguistic Intelligence within one of the learning options, you can implement word games, exercises of memory, puzzles, crossword puzzles and a large quantity of strategies that can improve the acquisition of a second language.