![]() ![]() Slowly students need to move from a situation of cognitive strain to one of cognitive ease with all aspects of the second language. The activities need to have a familiar pattern. Repeated use of that aspect of language, yes, but also a sense of comfortable repetition in the dynamics of the classroom. ![]() Of course the language has to have been studied, the why’s and the wherefore’s investigated, the similarities or dissimilarities with the students’ mother tongue taken into consideration, but that elusive cognitive ease will only come with constant carefully monitored use.Īnd so situation 1), repeated use. Here we are very close to language teaching. Physically the teacher needs to take care not to appear menacing. Lighting, heating, oxygen are all important. not encumbering), and they should be sitting casually close, able to chat, no-one with their back to anyone else. Students need to be relaxed (coats, bags etc. Where everyone physically is is important. A good mood in the classroom should be created by the teacher. To quote Kahneman: “ When you are in a state of cognitive ease, you are probably in a good mood, like what you see, believe what you hear, trust your intuitions, and f eel that the current situation is comfortably familiar.” “You are not supposed to be teaching English, you are supposed to be creating an environment where learning can take place”. He is in no way talking about language learning but those four situations should be ringing bells for us. He then gives 4 results which correspond to these causes. Kahneman points out 4 simple cause situations which are fundamental to cognitive ease. It is possible to learn cognitive ease, but what are the qualities of cognitive ease and how do we acquire them? But 12×12=…įor me there is no problem because I went to school when there were 12 pennies in a shilling (Napoleon had not yet won the war) and so we learned the 12 times table. ![]() And, of course, cognitive ease can be learnt. Without cognitive ease real communication is almost impossible. Not only do we want it, it is fundamental, at least in the areas of speaking and listening. Our problem as teachers is that we really do want our students to arrive at a state of cognitive ease when using their English as a second language. (We should try measuring the pupils of the eyes of our students when faced with complex third conditionals). Apparently cognitive strain can be measured by the changing size of the pupils of your eyes. System 2 is slow thinking, “cognitive strain”. When we are using system 1 we experience “cognitive ease”. Kahneman terms the process of fast thinking as “system 1”. Perhaps we can learn something from Daniel Kahneman and from dyslexia. (A past perfect being used to form a third conditional sentence which switches into past continuous and then back into the “would have” form of the possible consequence to the third condition. Yet for students of English as a foreign language this sort of automaticity will probably only come at C1 level or more realistically C2 level the top, after seven or eight years of language study. Any 6 year old can sing it if they are mother tongue English. “ If I’d known you were coming I’d ‘ve baked a cake”. ![]() Only a TEFL teacher might recognise the extraordinary difficulty which the sentence in the title represents for non mother tongue students. In theory neither “fast thinking” nor “automaticity” has much to do with TEFL (teaching English as a foreign language). There are degrees of severity for both situations, but, obviously, you can do without bicycles and ski-ing whereas our Western society regards the ability to read easily almost as a passport to success. It requires a sort of physiological “slow thinking”. Without that sense of balance the exercise is much more difficult and probably less fun. A natural sense of balance, for example, makes riding a bicycle or ski-ing a “fast thinking” exercise. Other people may have different problems but of a similar nature. The words or letters just seem not to stay in the right place. They do not have the automaticity which most people have when reading. “Slow thinking” is what sufferers from dyslexia experience when reading a fairly normal printed page. In the language used by students of dyslexic problems “fast thinking” is termed “automaticity”. Kahneman was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2002. Slow thinking is represented by “17×24=…?”. In Daniel Kahneman’s best selling book “Thinking, Fast and Slow”, fast thinking is exemplified quite simply by the phrase “‘2×2=4”. ![]()
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