Apologies. This talk has been moved to 3pm on Sunday.
The head of languages at a celebrated specialist school told a conference I attended at Wellington College a couple of years ago that, "We have a lot of tears in the first term." Observation of lessons over the last thirty years, my own and other people's, confirms this. Failure in languages usually starts right at the beginning, and becomes increasingly difficult to reverse.
This is not necessary. Brain research has given us valuable insights into the formation of the networks in the brain that are the physical manifestation of learning, and into ways of promoting them. In particular, it has shown that the areas of the brain involved in spoken and written language are located very close to each other, and often overlap. If we tap into this capacity from the first days of learning a new language, without overloading children with more information than their developing brains can handle at one time, we can replace tears and failure with smiles and success.
This presentation, which draws on previous presentations on brain research, will show how to do this for beginning learners in primary and secondary schools, and will feature the toolkits for French, German and Spanish available on this site. Once the basic approach shown in the toolkits is established, we can move outwards in any direction we choose, in order best to meet the needs and interests of our pupils.
http://johnbald.typepad.com/language/2017/10/brain-research-how-myolin-lets-us-think-faster.html