The presentation examines the benefits of employing the principles of brain-based learning to design an accelerated learning experience in the field of second language acquisition.

1. Utilizing Brain Based Learning to
Design an Accelerate Learning
Experience
Dr. Mishkat Al Moumin

2. Why Brain-based Learning?
“Educators who became aware on how the brain
learns will gain exciting ideas about conditions and
environment that can optimize learning.” (Caine &
Caine, 1990)

3. Scope and Definition
A strategic approach to providing instructions by engaging the
learner’s brain based on principles derived from understanding how
the brain functions.
Principles Strategies Engagement

4. Goals and
Objectives
Designing a learning
experience that utilizes
practical strategies linking
brain research to optimal
student achievement.

5. Computer vs Brain
• The computer processes information in a serial fashion. One
process has to end before the next starts.
• The brain processes information in a parallel manner. All
processes occur at the same time.

6. The Brain is a Parallel Processer
The brain performs several functions at the same time:
• Emotions
• Imagination
• Predication
 Maintaining health and
well-being.
 Increasing social growth.
 Acquiring cultural
knowledge.
for

7. Classroom
Implications
• Educators need to engage the learner
utilizing all of the dimensions of the
parallel processes to optimize and
accelerate learning.
Strategies and Examples:
• Composing a song encompassing all of the
difficult vocabulary.
• Designing a soap opera in which the
characters visit all the places to be studied in
the lesson. This engages the learners’
emotions when characters fall in love, face
difficulties, and go on adventures in the target
country.

8. All Learning is
Physiological
Strategies and Examples
• Stress management, mental
management, nutrition, and
exercise.
• Outdoor Teaching.
• One-on-one assessment.
• Similar to any other organ, rules
of physiology govern the brain.
• Stress, threats, boredom and fear
impact the brain.
• The brain is influenced differently
by peace, happiness, joy, and
challenge.

9. The Search for Meaning is Innate
• Learners look at their past experiences to process new
information.
• Learning starts from within; the brain records the familiar
information while responds to novel stimulation.

10. Connect and Satisfy
• Strategies and Examples:
• Embrace familiarity; connect the
unfamiliar with the familiar.
• Satisfy curiosity and hunger for novelty,
discovery, and challenge.
• Utilize authentic materials related to
detective shows.
• Employ treasure hunt activities.
• Apply scavenger hunt activities.
• Learners relate to the
materials, topics, and
vocabulary based on their
own personal experiences.
• The brain registers the
familiar while searching for
novel stimuli.

11. The Search for Meaning
Occurs through Patterning
• The brain automatically categorizes and organizes all the
pieces of information.
• The brain discards remote and isolated pieces of
information.

12. Employing Pattern
Strategies and Examples
• Support, influence, utilize patterning
• Thematic teaching.
• Loop activities.
• The Vocabulary Tree Project.
Pattern
=
Meaning

13. Negative Feelings vs
Positive Feelings
• Significant negative correlations second between
the anxiety of learning a second language and
students’ performance.
• Reducing student anxiety and providing a less
stressful classroom environment improves learning.
(Elkhafaifi, 2005.)

14. Emotions Are Critical
to Patterning
Strategies and Examples
- Engage students’ feelings and solicit their
emotions and reactions through topic
selection, delivery and execution.
- Teacher Students; same
students, same topic, same material, yet
different results with different teachers.
- Classroom and school environments; run
the gamut from arranging class objects to
designing a team-building workshop.
Emotions are an
essential part of
memory because they
help store and recall
the information.

15. The Brain Processes Parts
and Wholes Simultaneously.
Strategies and Examples
• Engaging the concepts of parts and the
wholes; the brain derives meaning from
both.
• Incorporating grammar with vocabulary,
listening and speaking, reading and
writing.
• Listening clinic followed by the speaking
club.
• Reading followed by reflective journals.
- The brain separates the
information; thus the
information is processed as a
part of a concept.
- Yet at the same time, the brain
organizes the information as it
relates to the concept as a
whole.

16. Learning Always Involves
Conscious And Unconscious
Processes
Strategies and Examples
• Design the learning experience to
maximize incidental or unconscious
learning.
• Engage students in active processing.
Provide the students with the opportunity
to review and reflect on what they
learned.
• Start the process by stating what you’ve
learned as a teacher.
• Ask reflective questions.
• Students can acquire
language without
deliberate attention.
• Learning can be
incidental through
association.

17. A Spatial Memory System and a Set of Systems for Rote Learning.
Spatial Memory System
• Designed to remember our
experiences without the need to
apply any memorization techniques.
• Always engaged and active.
• Motivated by novelty.
Rote Memory System
• Sort isolated experiences.
• Require more practice rehearsal.
• Information that is separated from
prior experience requires more
practice and rehearsal to recall.

18. .
- Engage and utilize the learner’s
previous experiences to transfer
learning.
- Employ real-life activities, field trips,
performance stories, metaphors.
Remember:
memorization is
limited while
experience is
limitless.

19. I can do it vs Oh my
God!
• When threatened, the brain
becomes less flexible and reverts
to primitive routine.
• The ideal method to learn is by
appropriately challenging the
brain.
• Create an environment of low
threat and high challenge.
• Utilize teaching methodologies to
create the high challenge and low
threat.

20. The Same Systems,
different Brains.
• Each brain is unique in
how it registers
emotions and relates to
experiences.
• Instructions should be
differentiated to
accommodate visual,
auditory, and tactile
learning styles.

21. Conclusions
• Employing deliberate strategies to engage the brain to
maximize and accelerate learning opportunities.
• Brain-based learning starts from believing that everyone
has unlimited capacity to learn.
• The teacher’s role is to enhance, build, and unleash those
capacities.

22. Thank You
Questions?