This is the fourth blog post in a series about EdTech’s myths based on Jared Cooney Horvath’s “The Digital Delusion”. If you missed the first, second, and third ones, make sure you read them before this one:

A Washington teacher once described what happened when she handed her seventh graders the reins. Every day, she sent them videos, websites, and activities to work through on their own, with a single live session every other day to “go deeper.” But that hour never went deep. Most students hadn’t done the work. The few who had were more confused than when they started. “We put kids in charge of their own learning,” she reflected, “and then acted surprised when it didn’t work.”

That story, told by Jared Cooney Horvath in The Digital Delusion, captures the myth I’m addressing in this post. It’s the belief that children learn best when they’re left to direct their own learning. It’s so widely held that it barely gets questioned anymore. I, for one, can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen it advertised in EdTech marketing campaigns, in professional development sessions, or in the language we use about “student agency” and “personalized pathways.” The problem is, as Horvath argues, that this belief is founded on a basic misreading of how the brain actually works.

Sure, toddlers really do learn effortlessly, if you think about it. I mean, just think about bilingual kids. Jared reminds us that they can absorb one, two, even three languages just by being exposed to them (we can discuss how effortless this process really is in a different post). But EdTech developers look at that and assume all learning should work the same way. In fact, think for a minute and try to answer the following:

How many times have you come across educational ads that mentioned the words “fun”, “engaging”, “flexible”, “easy”, “self-paced” or something similar?

What these ads, and many EdTech gurus, often miss is that learning changes as we grow. Around age five, the brain begins moving away from the kind of broad, exploratory learning that dominates early childhood toward learning that is more specialized and effortful. That means that mastering complex knowledge and skills increasingly requires attention, effort, and deliberate practice. Going back to language learning, we know adults require more than exposure, and it takes years of sustained work - I can certainly testify to that as I’m a language teacher, a language teacher educator, and a basic learner of Mandarin!

Jared mentions two routes to learning effectively when that shift occurs: trial and error, or guidance from someone who already knows what we are trying to learn. Here’s where things get interesting. From experience, I suppose we all know that trial and error gets the job done, of course, but it is often slow, inefficient, and, as Jared puts it, unreliable. Highly complex tasks, especially ones that involve danger and risks, should probably not be done on a trial-and-error basis.

The controversy

Here’s the thing. An entire educational approach that has become incredibly trendy over the years is pretty much based on trial and error with varying degrees of guidance. You know what I’m talking about. It’s the world-famous constructivist approach or pedagogy (is it really?). I found a very interesting definition for it on the eLearning Industry website:

Constructivism learning theory explains that people learn best by building knowledge through experience, reflection, and interaction rather than simply receiving information. Simply put, the constructivism definition centers on the idea that learners create meaning based on what they already know and what they experience. Constructivism is a way of learning where people build understanding by solving problems, working with others, and applying ideas to real situations. It is more than memorizing facts. Learners are encouraged to ask questions, think critically, and connect ideas instead of just taking in information.

Many educational ideas stem from constructivism. Here are a few:

• Active learning

• Flipped classroom

• Project-based learning

• Maker movement

And those educational ideas deserve a whole blog series to look at their pros and cons (which I will not do now). However, we must ask ourselves: is constructivism really a pedagogy? This is exactly the confusion Paul Kirschner addresses when we talked about constructivism on the Learning Cosmos Podcast. When I asked him about it on the Learning Cosmos Podcast, he was blunt:

Constructivism isn’t a pedagogy. It’s a philosophy. And it’s not a basis for how you can and should teach. So I wouldn’t call it an illusion. It’s a misconception that it’s just like the misconception that the way a scientist does science is the way to teach students science. Yeah, Derek Hodgson wrote in the 60s, 1960s and 70s. You have to remember that a scientist does science, and a learner learns science. Those are two completely different things. An expert is not just a big novice, and a novice is not just an expert who knows less. They see the world and experience the world differently. So you could call it just a misconception or a misappropriation, just like the idea of let’s teach kids science by having them do science.

I’ve been reflecting a lot on the example he mentioned at the end there. A student poking around a simulation or conducting an experiment in a lab is not necessarily doing what an expert does when they construct knowledge, simply because the student doesn’t yet have the schema to construct it with. Constructivism describes something true about cognition. We do build our own mental models, but maybe it’s not perfectly designed to tell you how to run a classroom, at least not how to run an entire course. Carl Hendrick made a similar point when I spoke with him on the Learning Cosmos Podcast:

And at a fundamental level, it is true to say that we do construct our own meaning. I mean, this is consistent with cognitive science principles. We need to construct schemas. We need to construct our own meaning. [Constructivism] It’s not a pedagogy. That’s not a good method of teaching and instruction. I think as well that constructivism is, and certainly there’s aspects of it that are, helpful and useful [referring to the idea of dialogic teaching and learning]

Before you accuse me of blasphemy, take it easy. Again, it’s not that the philosophy is wrong. I’m actually quite interested in Montessori, Reggio, and Waldorf schools, especially because of how they treat EdTech. The problem, the way I see it, is the leap from philosophy of how minds work to method of how classrooms should run when dealing with students of any age (and when teaching any subject, I might add). And that leap is exactly what much of EdTech has built its business model on. In an interview Kirschner gave to Educational Evidence, he has a name for this trend: the “constructivist fallacy.” He explains, once again, that the mistake was turning an explanation of how people make sense of knowledge into a prescription that students should therefore discover that knowledge with little or no guidance. And despite the repeated strikes against this idea, as Mayer famously put it, it keeps coming back, often repackaged with new terminology and, increasingly, new technology.

See Mayer, R. E. (2004). Should There Be a Three-Strikes Rule Against Pure Discovery Learning? American Psychologist, 59(1), 14–19. https://doi.org/10.1037/0003-066X.59.1.14

In his interview, Kirschner offers a few reasons for its remarkable endurance. One is what he calls the romantic view of education, that is, the very appealing idea that children are naturally curious and will figure things out if we simply create the right environment and get out of their way. Another is that we easily confuse activity with learning. Students building a papier-mâché volcano may be intensely engaged, cutting, painting, collaborating, pouring Coca-Cola and dropping Mentos into it, but that doesn’t mean they are thinking deeply about volcanism, plate tectonics, or the difference between magma and lava. They can be physically and socially engaged without being cognitively engaged. And, as mentioned before, there is also a tendency to confuse how experts produce knowledge with how novices learn it. Scientists discover because they already possess extensive background knowledge, whereas students are still building that knowledge. In other words, we can say that:

Engagement is not evidence of learning

I’ve also had a wonderful chat with John Sweller, the psychologist behind Cognitive Load Theory, on the Learning Cosmos Podcast. I asked him about his take on the constructivist education movement, which is especially influential in Brazil through schools built around self-discovery and problem-based learning. Sweller argued bluntly that this approach doesn’t hold up empirically: in randomized controlled trials comparing explicit instruction to discovery learning, students taught directly consistently outperform those left to construct knowledge on their own, even on problem-solving tests. His explanation is that “general problem-solving strategies” don’t really exist as teachable skills; instead, the strategies we do use are biologically primary, meaning we’re wired to use them instinctively rather than learn them in school. What actually enables good problem-solving, he said, is a rich base of knowledge stored in long-term memory. Without it, students are forced to juggle too much unfamiliar information in working memory at once, leading straight to cognitive overload.

Don't throw the constructivist baby out with the bathwater

I think the main takeaway from my chat with Sweller was that discovery-based learning is something we can use for very specific learning situations, and the reason why it often backfires is not that students lack the capacity to solve problems. It’s because they haven’t yet built the long-term knowledge base needed to problem-solve efficiently. Direct instruction, in Sweller’s view, is what builds that foundation, thus freeing up working memory for the problem-solving that constructivist methods try to teach directly, but can’t.

We shouldn’t demonize or completely disregard constructivism in our teaching practice. Both Kirschner and Hendrick seem to agree. Carl Hendrick specifically mentioned the idea of dialogic teaching as a place where constructivist ideas make a lot of sense when used by teachers actively shaping the conversation, not a student clicking alone through a module trying to learn a highly complex subject. That’s the distinction that keeps getting lost. Self-paced doesn’t have to mean unguided. The big problem is removing the person best equipped to help students construct knowledge well.

An example that came to mind was Jon Bergmann’s successful experience in Colorado that led to widespread adoption of Flipped Learning. I had a chance to interview Bergmann during the COVID-19 pandemic, and he told me how carefully scaffolded the instructions and materials were in that very specific scenario where kids simply didn’t have access to their teachers.

Years later, things took a turn. The pandemic recreated that same scenario where kids couldn’t access their teachers and, many times, the only alternative was to let them learn on their own so that schools could cope with the demand. We all saw what that large-scale self-paced learning experiment did to learning, didn’t we?

And there’s more. What concerns me the most today is that this whole myth of “kids learn best on their own” has been directly linked to the idea of replacing teachers with automated, gamified, AI-based, customized [insert whatever EdTech-related adjective you want] digital tools. Teachers aren’t cheerleaders standing on the sideline, waiting to be needed. They’re mentors, coaches, reliable sources of knowledge, and, most importantly, human.

As Jared points out, which aligns with the views brought here by other Science of Learning experts, leaving students alone, especially kids and teens, with the trial-and-error method most of us wouldn’t choose for anything that actually matters is hindering learning. Remember that Washington teacher and her seventh graders, sent off each day with videos, links, instructions, and a promise of independence? No matter how “engaging” the content was ever going to be, without proper guidance, motivation, encouragement, and prior knowledge, kids won’t stand a very good chance.

In short, kids and teens are cognitively and emotionally immature. They’re still developing the executive function and self-regulation that responsible, self-directed study actually requires. And yet we hand them shiny devices that are supposed to make learning easier, while teachers get pushed aside for EdTech to take over, or worse, get saddled with the impossible job of making every lesson engaging, entertaining, personalized, and flexible enough that these same immature kids will supposedly make the sound, wise decision to study on their own and push through the very real struggle learning requires.

That sounds a lot like wishful thinking to me.

And here’s the paradox. Constructivism (or at least social constructivism) has traditionally advocated for social interaction in learning contexts. But all of what’s happening now is, in reality, isolating kids in their own digital/online bubbles where they “interact” with AI-generated avatars and algorithms. What we need isn’t more freedom for students to “learn” on their own disguised as empowerment. It’s teachers - respected, valued, and properly trained to deliver high-quality lessons using methods and strategies the evidence actually supports, so students can build the prior knowledge they’ll need to effectively problem-solve on their own.

As I write this blog post, I am thrilled to share that I’m getting ready to pack my bags because I have been invited to return to China to teach at Shangqiu Normal University!

To be honest, it still feels a little surreal. But I owe you an apology. I never published the July newsletter, and I also had to postpone the launch of the Learning Cosmos Reading Club, which some of you may have been looking forward to.

With everything happening in my life right now(a research project, a major Science of Learning initiative, divorce, moving out, and trying to become a healthier version of myself), this invitation couldn't have come at a better time. It feels less like another professional opportunity and more like a reminder of why I started this journey in the first place.

It’s funny how just a few years ago, after joining BRAZ-TESOL’s Mind, Brain, and Education (MBE) SIG as a board member, I was trying to make sense of cognitive psychology, educational neuroscience, linguistics and second language acquisition, as well as the growing body of research on how people learn. Just a year after joining the MBE SIG, I was sitting in lecture halls at the University of Bristol, as a Chevening Scholarship recipient, watching my amazing professor Paul Howard-Jones talk about universal learning principles every educator should know. I had no idea what life was about to give me.

Watch my interview with Paul Howard-Jones on the Learning Cosmos Podcast

Looking back, I think I’ve always wanted to answer what I thought was a rather simple question: How can we help teachers make better decisions based on evidence rather than intuition or trends? I didn’t know then how complex it is to answer that. And I certainly never imagined that pursuing the answer(s) to that very question would eventually lead me to where I am now. It's remarkable how that single question has shaped the last few years of my life. It has taken me to classrooms and conferences in Italy, Greece, Mexico, Peru, Canada, and now back to China. It inspired the creation of the Learning Cosmos Conceptual Framework, the launch of the Learning Cosmos Podcast, where I've had the privilege of interviewing many of the world's leading researchers in the Science of Learning, and it helped this very publication grow into one of Substack's Top 100 education blogs.

More recently, my pursuit has led to a new book deal with Vórtex Educação and to the honour of delivering the keynote at ExpoEduc, the largest education conference in Brazil's North and Northeast regions.

My Chinese Adventure

You may not remember, but I’ve already been to China. In fact, I talked about my experience as a lecturer at Anyang Preschool Education College last year. It was equally amazing and challenging. I even shared with you my Mandarin learning process in a few blog posts here.

Even though I’m going back to the same province (Henan), before accepting the invitation, I knew almost nothing about Shangqiu. Like many people outside China, I had never heard of the city. And yet it turns out to be one of the oldest places in the country, with a history stretching back over 4,000 years. It’s considered a cradle of Chinese civilization itself, the birthplace of the Shang Dynasty, China’s first dynasty confirmed by both archaeology and written record. Even the Chinese words for “merchant” and “commerce” are said to trace back to this one place.

The more I read, the more excited I got to visit the city. Zhuangzi and Mozi, two of the philosophers whose ideas quietly shape how much of East Asia still thinks about ethics and nature, were both born there. So was the legend of Hua Mulan - yes, the same Mulan of the Disney animation and live-action remake - whose story of courage has inspired countless generations both within China and abroad. There’s even an ancient observatory in the city, said to be the first in China, where people once tried to read the sky looking for patterns that explain something larger than themselves.

In a way, I like that I’m arriving at Shangqiu the same way I arrive at most good ideas in education: by accident, and a little late. Some of the places and ideas that change our lives are the ones we’ve never heard of until the moment they appear. I suspect September will teach me that lesson again, this time with a few thousand years of history standing behind it.

Why explore the Science of Learning

I’ve mentioned this here a few times, but the more I travel, the more I realize that teachers everywhere are asking remarkably similar questions:

How do we keep students engaged?

How do we reduce cognitive overload?

How can AI become a tool for learning rather than a shortcut around thinking?

How do we teach in ways that create lasting learning instead of temporary performance?

Everywhere I go, these conversations keep coming back. Education systems may look different, but the cognitive architecture of the human brain does not, and the Science of Learning can help us understand it. That, to me, is one of the most beautiful aspects of the Science of Learning. It gives us a common language. It allows us to move beyond educational fads and focus on that fundamental question.

Much of what I taught in Anyang last year and will be teaching in Shangqiu in September has already been developed here over the past few years through my work with teachers, universities, the British Council, National Geographic Learning and other publishers, and the Learning Cosmos community. It was also the foundation of a teacher education program that received funding through the Chevening Alumni Programme Fund, supported by the UK Government.

I’ve piloted this program in association with the Municipal Department of Education in my city and received incredibly positive feedback. My Chevening team and I will eventually work on a few adjustments to offer different formats next year, but I realized that this material shouldn’t be restricted to only a few groups. It needed to become something that teachers could access whenever they wanted.

That’s exactly why you can now access the Learning Cosmos Science of Learning Program. It’s only available in Portuguese now, but it will soon be available in English.

It brings together the core ideas I wish every teacher had encountered during their initial teacher education:

1. Human cognitive architecture (cognitive load theory, dual coding, concrete examples, elaboration)

2. Desirable difficulties (retrieval practice, spacing, interleaving, pretesting)

3. Self-regulation (metacognition, self-efficacy, motivation)

You can find lots of practical classroom strategies grounded in decades of research, a coursebook designed according to Science of Learning principles

And you can download cards with evidence-informed strategies to explore.

If you’ve been following my writing here for a while and would like to explore these ideas in greater depth, I’d love to invite you to join the program.

Watch a video from the course:

As a thank-you to this community, I’ve also decided to make it available at a special price for a limited time.

Learn more about the program

Whether I’m teaching in Goiânia, Bristol, Italy, Greece, Mexico, Peru, Canada, or soon in Shangqiu, one thing keeps becoming clearer to me. Great teaching is not about having the newest technology or following the latest trend. It begins with understanding how people learn. Borders, languages, and curricula may change, but human cognition doesn’t. If we can help more teachers teach in ways that respect how the mind works, we won’t just improve classrooms; we’ll improve lives. And that’s a journey I’m incredibly grateful to continue sharing with you.

Perhaps you’ve found yourself asking questions similar to the ones that first set me on this path. How can I become a better teacher? Why do some students thrive while others struggle, despite my best efforts? What does science actually tell us about learning?

In many ways, these are all different versions of the same question - yes, the same one that has shaped my career over the past several years.

If you’re ready to start exploring those answers, I’d be delighted to welcome you to the Learning Cosmos Science of Learning Program. It’s the closest thing I can offer to the journey that began with a single question and continues to take me to classrooms and universities around the world.

Because sometimes the most important decisions we make are not the ones that bring immediate rewards, but the ones that lead us to spend years pursuing a question that genuinely matters.

Learn more about the program

This month, I’d like to do something a little different.

One of the questions I receive most often is:

“Where should I start learning about the Science of Learning?”

There are now hundreds of books, articles, podcasts, YouTube channels, and newsletters. The field has grown tremendously over the last decade, which I think is wonderful, but it can also feel overwhelming.

So this month’s newsletter is about some of the best free resources available online that I regularly recommend to teachers, students, researchers, and anyone interested in how people learn. And it’s also about 3 paid resources from the Learning Cosmos Ecosystem.

I used to have a friend who would always remind us that caring is sharing. I couldn’t agree more because good science becomes even better when it’s shared.

UNESCO

UNESCO has been publishing excellent resources on the Science of Learning over the years. Click on the image above to get its “Insights from the Science of Learning for Education”. Don’t forget to check out UNESCO’s Global Alliance on the Science of Learning for Education on this link: https://www.unesco.org/en/quality-learning/science/global-alliance

Deans for Impact

Deans for Impact has just released the second edition of its Science of Learning publication. For some reason, I cannot access its website, but here is the link: https://www.deansforimpact.org/tools-and-resources/the-science-of-learning

If you experience the same difficulty, you can download it from a folder I created on this link: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1lu-n6P0xgk6Gr4gbRn7PddQV1A4j4In4/view?usp=sharing

The Learning Cosmos Reading Club Is Finally Here!

Many of you answered my poll a few months ago asking for opportunities to explore research more deeply.

I’m excited to say that it’s finally happening.

At the end of July, we’ll launch the first Learning Cosmos Reading Club.

Each month we’ll read and discuss one influential book or a selection of research papers related to:

• Science of Learning

• Educational Psychology

• Neuroscience

• Language Learning

• Artificial Intelligence in Education

• Educational Technology

The idea is for us to unpack the reading together, discuss practical implications, and connect them with classroom practice as well as your own learning experiences.

The Reading Club will be available exclusively to paid Learning Cosmos subscribers. Upgrade to paid, and you will soon receive an email with instructions on how to join the discussion sessions and other things.

Subscribe now

The first book club will be on Dr. Anna Lembke’s bestseller “Dopamine Nation”.

Join the club and get the benefits! As Carl Sagan reminds us:

What an astonishing thing a book is. It’s a flat object made from a tree with flexible parts on which are imprinted lots of funny dark squiggles. But one glance at it and you’re inside the mind of another person, maybe somebody dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, an author is speaking clearly and silently inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs. Books break the shackles of time. A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic.

— Carl Sagan

For Those Who Want to Go Further

Over the past few months, many readers have asked how they can study these ideas more systematically or receive personalized guidance.

I’ve been developing two ways to support educators at different stages of their journey.

🇧🇷 Ciência da Aprendizagem (Portuguese)

If you’re looking for a structured introduction to the Science of Learning in Portuguese, my online course brings together many of the ideas explored here on the newsletter, the blog, and the podcast, organized into practical modules with classroom applications.

It’s designed for teachers who want evidence-informed strategies they can implement immediately.

Learn more

Learning Cosmos Mentoring

If you’re working on a larger project, whether that’s curriculum design, teacher education, academic research, conference presentations, publishing, or implementing evidence-informed practices in your institution, I also offer individual mentoring.

Every mentoring program is tailored to the participant’s goals, allowing us to work together on real projects while connecting research with practice.

Learn more

From the Cosmos

Without an understanding of human cognitive architecture, instruction is blind.

— John Sweller

The challenge for educators isn’t simply finding information.

It’s learning how to distinguish evidence from opinion—and then turning that evidence into better teaching.

Thank you for continuing this journey with me.

See you in July!

Hopefully in our very first Reading Club.

Let me start with a thought.

One of the things I love most about education is that it sits at the intersection of so many different disciplines: psychology, neuroscience, technology, language, sociology, and human development. Yet, amidst all these influences, one question remains surprisingly stable:

How do we help people learn more effectively?

Whether we’re discussing AI, classroom technology, behavior management, bilingualism, or curriculum design, the answer often comes back to the same place: understanding learners and the conditions that support learning.

And that brings me to something exciting...

A New Learning Cosmos Reading & Study Group

For quite some time, I’ve been thinking about creating a space where we can go beyond blog posts and podcast episodes.

A space for:

• Reading and discussing influential books and articles

• Exploring key concepts from the Science of Learning in greater depth

• Connecting research to real classroom challenges

• Sharing ideas with educators from different contexts

I’m happy to announce that the Learning Cosmos Reading & Study Group will officially launch in June.

More details will be coming soon, but if you’ve ever wanted a more interactive way to engage with the ideas we discuss here, this is for you.

What’s New in the Learning Cosmos

New Blog Series Continues

My series inspired by Jared Cooney Horvath’s The Digital Delusion continues.

So far, we’ve explored two of the five myths that helped shape the EdTech movement:

• Myth 1: Education is Broken

• Myth 2: Multimedia Enhances Learning

The next article, Myth 3, is here:

If you’ve enjoyed the previous articles, I think you’ll find this one particularly thought-provoking.

Latest Podcast Episode

This month, I had the pleasure of interviewing Dr. Gianfranco Conti, a very influential voice in language education today. Our conversation explored topics connecting cognitive science and language teaching. It was an engaging discussion filled with practical insights, and I can’t wait for you to listen to it.

I’ve also interviewed Dr. Rebecca Schmor. Besides trying some of the languages we both speak, we discussed English as a Lingua Franca, and accent.

Chá Pedagógico at Bett 2026

The latest episode of Chá Pedagógico, which I co-host with Rodolfo Mattiello, is now available.

Recorded live during Bett Brasil 2026, we reflect on some of the key ideas, trends, innovations, and challenges that emerged from one of the largest education events in Latin America. This one was recorded in Portuguese, but you can turn on the translated caption if you have to

On the Road

ICBEU Manaus

This month I had the opportunity to travel to ICBEU Manaus, where I delivered a workshop on:

Misbehavior in the Classroom: Causes and Solutions

The session explored what psychology, neuroscience, and educational research can tell us about student behavior, self-regulation, motivation, classroom climate, and practical strategies teachers can implement immediately.

I had the absolute pleasure of delivering my talk inside their beautiful gallery.

Thank you to everyone who attended and contributed to such rich discussions.

Next Stop: Curitiba

In June, I’ll be heading to Curitiba to record a new professional development course focused on:

Practical Uses of Artificial Intelligence to Support Teachers

The goal is not to present AI as a replacement for professional judgment, but as a tool that can help educators save time, improve planning, generate resources, and focus more energy on what matters most: teaching and learning.

I’m looking forward to sharing more details soon.

A Quick Insight

One theme has connected many of this month’s activities:

Tools don’t really improve learning. People do.

Whether we’re talking about AI, educational technology, behavior management, or instructional design, the impact comes not from the tool itself, but from how it is used.

Technology can amplify good teaching.

It can also amplify poor teaching.

The difference lies in the decisions educators make.

A Practical Reflection

As you plan your next lesson, consider asking yourself:

Which parts of this lesson truly require human expertise, and which parts could be supported by tools or technology?

The most effective use of technology may not be replacing what teachers do best.

It may be creating more time for teachers to do it.

From the Cosmos

Well, we could be talking about something else also, but why are we talking about science and learning or cognitive science or evidence-informed practices? It’s because it comprises of robust theories of teaching and learning that are supported by rigorous and relevant research evidence.

— Nidhi Sachdeva

It’s a reminder that we should all learn more about the Science of Learning

Thank you for being part of this journey into the learner’s universe.

Subscribe now

Dr. Gianfranco Conti’s journey to global educational consultancy began 10 years ago after 28 years of teaching and middle management within the British International School System. An extraordinary professional path took him from working as a classroom teacher in an international school in Malaysia to achieving several major milestones: winning the prestigious TES Best Contributor Award; founding Language Gym, a language learning platform with over 3,000 subscribers, primarily schools; authoring the globally influential and award-winning blog The Language Gym; publishing bestselling books such as The Language Teacher Toolkit, Breaking the Sound Barrier: Teaching Learners How to Listen, and the Sentence Builders series; advising governments on educational policy; and creating the professional development Facebook group Global Innovative Language Teachers, which has become one of the fastest-growing communities of its kind, with more than 15,000 members.

In his role as a keynote speaker and professional development provider, Dr. Conti aims to enhance teachers’ understanding of cognitive science and language acquisition while sharing evidence-based classroom practices alongside the pedagogical rationale underpinning them — the “why” behind the “how.”

His academic work in Second Language Acquisition (SLA) began during his MA TEFL studies at the University of Reading under the supervision of Professor Cyril Weir, a leading figure in applied linguistics. He later continued this work during his PhD in Language Education and through an ERIC-funded research project on writing instruction in Oxfordshire schools under the guidance of Professor Ernesto Macaro of the University of Oxford, one of the world’s foremost SLA researchers. Awarded a Visiting Fellowship by the University of Reading, Dr. Conti is currently researching listening, oral fluency, and vocabulary acquisition at the institution.

Over the last six years, Dr. Conti has delivered keynote presentations and continuing professional development (CPD) sessions at more than 600 schools, reaching approximately 7,000 teachers and university lecturers, while also working with thousands of language teachers and senior educational leaders from around the world.

His books are available on Amazon and here’s his website:

https://gianfrancoconti.com/

This is the third blog post in a series about EdTech’s myths. If you missed the first and the second ones, make sure you read them before this one:

Every week, I witness the same scenario (with minor differences). I’m in the line of an all-you-can-eat restaurant by myself or with my wife, and ahead of us there’s a couple with their kid. Sometimes it’s just the dad or mom - and occasionally, even another family member or caregiver. This generic kid is usually aged between 6 and 11 years. Sometimes it’s a boy, sometimes it’s a girl.

The scene goes like this:

Caregiving adult holding a tray and plates: What do you want to eat?

Generic 6-11-year-old kid: I want French fries and a steak.

Caregiving adult holding a tray and plates: Don’t you want some rice? How about broccoli? Just a little.

Generic 6-11-year-old kid: NOOOO! No broccoli and no rice! I want some chicken too. But NO SALAD!

Caregiving adult holding a tray and plates: You have to eat vegetables.

Generic 6-11-year-old kid: But I hate vegetables! I don’t want any!

Some folks witnessing the event start getting impatient because it can go on for a while, and hungry people usually hate when someone holds the line. But, to be very honest, in the end, usually the child gets their way. Perhaps the adult is trying to avoid a public meltdown like in other situations I have seen - especially on airplanes when kids start to cry, and parents desperately offer them a plethora of distractors ranging from an animated series on their tablets or a fun game on their phones.

I gotta ask, though. Isn’t it clear that children are not the best judges when it comes to what they should be eating or accessing on mobile devices? However, somehow we’ve bought into the idea that when presented with learning options, children will make the best choices. Choices that should enhance their learning.

That’s not what’s happening. The premise that learners always know what works best for learning is a misconception. points that out in “The Digital Delusion” and, to illustrate, applies a quick survey to check what our learning preferences are, depending on different tasks and using different tools. That ties in with the most prevalent neuromyth in education: the learning styles theory.

As I wrote in a previous blog post:

It’s not about how we prefer to learn, really. It’s more about the content of what we’re learning and which formats or media work best to convey it.

Another point raised by Jared in this section of his book relates to learning strategies. We should know by now that we’re all biased and that is no different when it comes to choosing what (we think) works best when we’re studying. We often favor strategies that reinforce what the Bjorks call “a false sense of fluency / competency”. In other words, we use strategies that feel effective because they are intuitive and because they “sorta” make sense.

Here are the most common ones:

• rereading

• highlighting

• summarizing

• imagery for text

• keyword mnemonic

The problem here is that, according to a highly cited paper from 2013 by John Dunlosky, Daniel Willingham, and other researchers, these techniques are low in effectiveness. When I interviewed John Dunlosky, he said that:

And let me start with what doesn’t work so well and why. And then say, in fact, don’t stop using these things. So take something like summarizing and highlighting. Okay. Research, lots of research suggests that using those techniques like highlighting a chapter doesn’t help you learn it any better than just reading that chapter. So when I tell students, don’t throw away your highlighter though, because highlighting is the start of the journey, right? You highlight what you think you need to know, you’re identifying it. Summarizing? The same thing. You’re trying to summarize what you need to learn, but then you have to use other techniques to learn them, right?

Daniel Willingham told me that:

Rereading might help you recognize things later. It's not going to help you produce them. And on the test, you're going to have to produce things. It’s like, you don’t have to use flashcards, but it’s very easy to structure things with flashcards if you’re trying to study it. The main thing you’re trying to do is probe your memory and give yourself practice in going into memory, finding something, and producing it.

What works best then? Desirable difficulties. The 2013 paper showed exactly that. The techniques that proved more effective were basically the list of desirable difficulties proposed by Robert Bjork:

• practice testing (or retrieval practice)

• distributed practice (or spacing)

• interleaved practice

When I interviewed the Bjorks for the Learning Cosmos Podcast, Robert Bjork said:

What’s almost sinister, if you think of it in a certain way, is that learning skills and other things, many things that will enhance performance during the process, massing practice, giving yourself various cues and so on, those very same things that will enhance performance during the study period are not the things that will enhance your recall or use of that information when you really need it at a later time. So that was part of the “making things hard on yourself”, but in a good way.

What makes this especially relevant to EdTech is that many educational technologies are built around comfort, convenience, and immediate engagement. Students can choose how they want to study, how fast they want to move, which formats they prefer, and sometimes even whether they want to face a challenge at all. The assumption is that more autonomy leads to more motivation, and more motivation leads to more learning.

The problem is that learning does not always follow intuition.

If learners naturally gravitate toward strategies that create a false sense of fluency — rereading, highlighting, massed practice, familiar formats — then unrestricted choice can quietly become a trap. We select what feels productive rather than what is productive. We optimize for immediate performance instead of long-term learning.

That is precisely why desirable difficulties matter. Retrieval practice feels harder than rereading. Spacing feels slower than cramming. Interleaving feels messier than practicing one thing repeatedly. Yet those very difficulties strengthen long-term retention and transfer. As Robert Bjork argues, conditions that improve performance during study are often not the same conditions that improve learning over time.

The implication for teachers is important. Good instruction is not merely giving students what they want. We teachers must help them experience what they need.

Jared said it best:

This is one of EdTech’s great miscalculations. Many developers assume students are better served when they can adapt instruction and strategies to fit their preferences. But in practice, this type of personalization often breeds a false sense of mastery while quietly undermining real learning

There’s another side to this conversation that often gets ignored: teachers.

The narrative that learning improves when students constantly choose how they learn places a tremendous burden on educators. Teachers are increasingly expected not only to plan lessons aligned with curricular goals, evidence-informed strategies, and assessment requirements, but also to create endless alternatives to accommodate preferences and maximize engagement. And not just any alternatives. Frequently, the expectation is that these options must be more entertaining, more exciting, more “outside the box.” If a student does not enjoy the activity, the assumption is often that the teacher simply has not made it engaging enough.

The problem is that meaningful learning and entertainment are not always the same thing. Productive struggle rarely looks as attractive as effortless consumption. Yet when schools and systems increasingly communicate that teachers must constantly compete for students’ attention, redesign lessons around preferences, and reinvent learning experiences to maintain engagement, we create conditions that contribute to exhaustion and burnout. Good teaching becomes confused with perpetual performance, while evidence-informed instruction risks being replaced by an endless search for novelty.

Of course, freedom matters. I’m not against it. Student agency is quite important. Intrinsic motivation makes a difference too. But freedom without guidance can be as problematic as handing complete control of nutrition to a child standing in front of an all-you-can-eat buffet.

Learning is not always intuitive, as demonstrated here. That means that students do not automatically know which strategies will help them build durable knowledge, just as children do not automatically know what makes a healthy meal.

This is where educators matter. Great teaching involves designing environments that balance autonomy with evidence-informed guidance. Students should absolutely have choices — but not all choices are equally beneficial for learning.

The myth that “free choice automatically leads to better learning” sounds appealing because it aligns with how we wish learning worked. The evidence, however, points somewhere else. Real learning often requires challenge, effort, productive struggle or, as pointed out before, desirable difficulties.

Sometimes, the broccoli belongs on the plate.

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In this episode, I had the pleasure of speaking with Dr. Rebecca Schmor:

Dr. Schmor is a researcher and educator specializing in plurilingualism, language education, and teacher identity. Rebecca holds a PhD in Language and Literacies Education from the University of Toronto, where her work explores the complex identities and practices of instructors working in English for Academic Purposes.

Her research sits at the intersection of multilingualism, inclusion, and pedagogy, with a strong focus on how teachers and learners navigate linguistic and cultural diversity in real classrooms. She has published extensively in leading journals and contributed to books on multilingual education, bringing both theoretical depth and practical relevance to the field.

Rebecca is proficient in 5 languages (English, Spanish, German, Italian, French).

Beyond her academic work, Rebecca also supports students and professionals through academic writing services available on her website, helping them navigate the challenges of writing and publishing in academic contexts.

Let me start with a thought.

If we want to improve education, we often look for new tools, new methods, and, particularly, new technologies. The thing is: the most powerful shift comes from understanding something more fundamental, and that’s how we actually learn. That’s precisely why I have…

a quick question for you

Lately, I’ve been wondering how to create a space for going a bit deeper into these ideas.

Not just blog posts or podcast episodes, but something more:

• deeper explorations of key concepts

• practical tools and applications

• perhaps even live discussions or a reading club

A space to connect research and classroom practice in a more sustained way.
I’d love to hear your thoughts.

What’s new in the Learning Cosmos

Research & Conference

I’m currently working on a systematic review on Human Cognitive Architecture in Teacher Education, which has been accepted for oral presentation at the STLHE 2026 Conference in Canada. The project explores how teacher education programs incorporate ideas like working memory, cognitive load, and the relationship between memory systems, and what this means for classroom practice.

New Blog Series

I’ve started a five-part series inspired by Jared Cooney Horvath’s The Digital Delusion. The posts unpack common myths about learning and education, including:

• “Education is broken”
  

• “Multimedia enhances learning”

  
  (and more to come)

  ---

Latest Podcast Episodes

Recent conversations include:

• Jennifer Jenkins (English as a Lingua Franca Expert)
  

• Evelina Fedorenko (Cognition and Language Expert at MIT)
  

A quick insight

One of the recurring ideas across all of this work is simple, but often overlooked:

Learning is constrained, and enabled, by human cognitive architecture.

When we ignore this, we design instruction that looks engaging but doesn’t lead to lasting learning. When we align with it, even small changes can have a significant impact.

A practical reflection

As you plan your next lesson, you might ask:

What is competing for my students’ attention, and what is actually supporting their learning?

Sometimes, less really is more.

From the Cosmos

“Without an understanding of human cognitive architecture, instruction is blind”
— John Sweller

Thanks for being part of this journey into the learner’s universe.

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This is the second blog post in a series about EdTech’s myths. If you missed the first one, make sure you read it before this one:

Overstimulation: an idea that was put to the test in the late 90s

Growing up in the 80s and 90s meant hearing a million times—and from multiple sources—something that went like this:

If only those students had access to more resources…

If you were privileged like me, even though I went to public school from kindergarten to 6th grade, that sounded logical and, at the same time, a little odd. After all, I had access to the school library, where I could read all sorts of books and posters, including National Geographic magazines. My parents subscribed to different newspapers, and I bought comic books every month.

But we also had a VCR at home, and I remember my teachers pushing a wheeled shelf through the hallway with a huge TV set and VCR whenever they wanted us to watch a movie or documentary.

Our greatest assets, at least the way I saw it, were the overhead projector and the mimeograph machine. I still remember the smell of alcohol and the purple ink. If I close my eyes now, I can visualize my science teacher drawing a cell and its organelles on a transparency and projecting it onto the back wall.

Weren’t all those gadgets enough for us to learn?

There’s a lot more knowledge available in the world today. In fact, we’re constantly producing more and more knowledge and, if you think about it, it kind of makes sense to assume that we need to ramp up stimulation. After all, schools need to keep up with innovation, right?

That’s what many policymakers, school managers, and even teachers thought. So, in the late 1990s, we saw a boom in the use of multimedia in schools. In 2005, as a young adult who had just landed my first job as a teacher, I was able to witness firsthand how multimedia implementation evolved.

The boom of multimedia and the matter of engagement

I started with CD players and then Epson projectors, and by 2010, I was already using interactive whiteboards with surround-sound speakers in the classroom. I could easily play a YouTube video or use my magnetic pen to draw and color anything, write, drag and drop answers on a gamified platform, and so on.

I actually wrote in my first book, The Owl Factor: Reframing your Teaching Philosophy (2022):

Lack of interest and low engagement were signs that something was not going well. But then again, that was just one side of the story. For many years after that, I tended to associate entertainment with learning. The more engaged my students seemed, the more I thought they were learning.

And let’s be honest: nothing beats a game or a well-produced YouTube video when it comes to engagement. Well… at least, usually.

starts addressing this myth by describing the amazing visuals and audio of a David Attenborough documentary. I used to devour those Nat Geo videos of predators hunting in the African savannah.

But when I think about them now, I have to agree with Jared when he concludes:

I cannot really remember the top speed of a cheetah or anything about its lifespan. I might recall something about its tail giving it stability while running and making those sharp turns to secure the day’s meal. But to be very honest, I can only remember bits and pieces of certain videos I watched.

I later came to the conclusion that multimedia devices may not always engage students—and when they do, that doesn’t mean they will learn the content or skill effectively.

Jared discusses how decades of research show that multimedia devices can actually distract students. He offers an anecdote to illustrate this: in first grade, despite playing The Oregon Trail—a game designed to teach history—for many hours, he didn’t learn anything about the history of the Oregon Trail.

What resonated most with me in this section of Jared’s book was the part where he talks about Duolingo. He writes:

I remember embarking on a Duolingo journey on two different occasions. I wanted to learn some basic Greek before my trip to Athens in 2023. I was the academic director of an organization, and we had planned our conference there. I didn’t want to arrive without being able to say a few things.

I “learned” some basic sentences and used a few, but I can confidently say now that, in 2026, I mostly just know how to order a beer in Greek.

Now let’s talk about Chinese. I started learning a bit of Chinese on Duolingo last year, about two months before leaving for China to teach Educational Psychology at Anyang Preschool Education College. I can remember a lot more than I do from my Greek lessons.

You might be thinking:

Well, it was not that long ago

You probably had to use the language more than when you were in Greece

Although both statements are correct, what really made a difference for me was that I didn’t rely exclusively on Duolingo to learn Chinese. I documented the process, and it involved a lot of effortful learning through retrieval practice and spaced repetition.

And the funny thing is: none of those strategies relied heavily on multimedia. I just used a notebook and a pencil, as well as a blackboard—my wall, actually—and chalk.

Multimedia: not great according to human cognitive architecture

Reflecting what Jared’s book, “The Digital Delusion”, addresses, I wrote this in an article for Modern English Teacher (MET) a few years ago:

If there’s one thing my conversation with John Sweller reinforced, it’s that effective learning is about how well we align instruction with the limits of human cognitive architecture.

Cognitive Load Theory reminds us that working memory is severely limited. Overloading it with sounds, images, animations, and interactions that are not directly relevant to the learning goal, just creates noise that actually competes with effective learning.

Jared points out that:

Engagement, in this sense, can be misleading because even though students may be looking, clicking, laughing, and reacting, that doesn’t mean that they’re processing, integrating, and sending the information to long-term memory.

OK, OK, OK… One might say that from a cognitive load perspective, the problem is not multimedia itself, but how it is used. But if you really think about, it enables - and often invites - a very popular neuromyth: multitasking. Encouraging learners to split their attention across multiple streams of information increases extraneous load and, consequently, is detrimental to learning.

What do you think? Share your comments here and stay tuned for the third blog post of this series.

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A Science of Learning Course in Portuguese!

If you are interested in learning more about the Science of Learning, make sure you check out my latest Science of Learning course. You can now purchase this 6h asynchronous course and download an exclusive course book with interactive activities on:

• Cognitive Load Theory

• Desirable Difficulties

• Self-regulation and Metacognition

The course is in Portuguese.

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Let me start by saying that I, too, have sinned. You may even find evidence of my sins recorded all over the internet. On different occasions, I have confessed—without much guilt—that digital technologies might be a solution to education’s “inherent problems,” and that “teachers simply need to understand how to better use [insert any tech resource here].” I have also argued that hands-on activities and active learning should be more prevalent.

Having done my mea culpa, and in an attempt to justify my actions while asking for forgiveness, I must also say that I’ve been committing this sin less and less as I learn more about the implications of EdTech use in educational settings. In fact, I’ve written on this very blog articles that demonstrate this shift. Here are two examples:

The truth is: the more I read about EdTech—particularly gamified platforms, AI, single-user devices, and social media (and the claim that these tools make learning more “active”)—the less I believe they offer real solutions. As a matter of fact, it’s becoming increasingly clear to me—and to many researchers and educators—that EdTech may be creating more problems than it solves.

This is exactly why I decided to write this article focusing on ‘s first chapter of his latest book “The Digital Delusion: How Classroom Technology harms our Kids’ learning - and how to help them thrive again”. This is the first five-part blog series examining the five myths described in Jared’s book:

1. Education is broken

2. Multimedia enhances learning

3. Free choice leads to better learning

4. Kids learn best on their own

5. Intelligent tutors make kids more intelligent

EdTech capitalizes on myths about learning

Besides being an incredibly articulate thinker, Jared is simply a delight to talk to. Many of the ideas he explores in his book came up during our conversation on the Learning Cosmos podcast. In his latest book, he wisely begins by examining how EdTech became such a seductive force in educational systems worldwide.

Just think about how much is spent globally on EdTech.

Better yet—if you’re an educator, policymaker, parent, or family member—ask yourself:

How many times have you heard that EdTech was going to make learning faster, better, more fun, and effortless?

Schools proudly advertise that they’ve implemented the latest platform, that every student now has a tablet or laptop, or that AI-powered tools can personalize learning and deliver on-demand feedback like never before. Pair that with buzzwords like active learning or hands-on experiences, and you’ve got a winning pitch. Here’s another question for you then:

How come children seem to be learning less effectively nowadays—and increasingly so?

Jared writes:

So, what are those beliefs and why are they misguided? As someone whose mission includes fighting neuromyths (or edumyths), I felt compelled to explore them here and reflect on what can be done at this stage. Let’s begin with the first myth and unpack the others in future posts.

Myth 1 - Education is broken

This myth resonated deeply with me because I, like many of you, was inspired by Sir Ken Robinson’s famous TED Talk, Do Schools Kill Creativity? I even dreamed of becoming a TED speaker because of him.

His central argument was that schools fail to engage students or tap into their curiosity. In his view, schools “anesthetize” students by teaching uninteresting subjects—or teaching them in outdated ways. About halfway through his talk, Robinson says::

He is alluding to the fact that — and I suppose we can partially agree with him here — many schools prioritize academic subjects over artistic ones. To make his point about creativity, he frames the debate as a dichotomy. But if you pause for a second, academic subjects also demand creativity, critical thinking, and imagination. It’s not that simple.

I’m not saying painting, music, dance, and other artistic disciplines don’t deserve more space in curricula worldwide. They absolutely do. The point is that education is an enormous undertaking, and learning is a deeply complex phenomenon. Creativity does not emerge from a vacuum. There can be no creativity without foundational (prior) knowledge. We may all agree that education is far from perfect, but it is certainly not “broken” — at least not in the simplistic way that popular narratives suggest.

The deeper issue — and one reflected in Sir Ken Robinson’s assumptions — lies in how knowledge itself has been reframed in recent decades, particularly the role explicit or teacher-led instruction plays in transmitting that knowledge. Explicit teaching has been quietly (and sometimes loudly) demonized. It is often reduced to caricatures of authoritarianism or mindless rote learning. In its place, we’ve elevated trendy “active learning” methods and loosely defined student-centered approaches, supposedly superior because they (allegedly):
a) engage students more; and
b) create more memorable learning experiences.

However, as John Sweller, father of Cognitive Load Theory, told me in our conversation for the Learning Cosmos podcast:

In essence, he was reminding us that the most efficient way to teach complex ideas — given the constraints of human cognitive architecture, particularly working memory limitations — is often to clearly explain and model them. That means to tell or to show them.

Setting up a hands-on or discovery-based activity is not inherently wrong. But for novices, it frequently overloads the very system that is supposed to process new information. The sheer amount of background knowledge and procedural skill required to “figure it out” independently can exceed what working memory can handle

Aligned with that view is my other podcast guest’s contribution. said that:

He went on and explained that:

Jared brilliantly states in his book that:

And that sentence alone dismantles much of the myth.

Because here’s the uncomfortable conclusion: demonizing explicit teaching does not improve learning. Making lessons “fun” does not guarantee understanding. Adding hands-on activities does not automatically deepen cognition. Integrating technology does not magically enhance thinking. And making everything easier, faster, or more entertaining does not equal better learning.

We don’t approach physical health this way. Going to the gym isn’t always fun. Eating broccoli instead of chocolate cake rarely feels thrilling. Waking up early to exercise demands effort and discipline. Yet we accept these things because we understand something fundamental, that is, what is beneficial is not always immediately pleasurable.

Why, then, have we started to redesign education around what feels engaging in the moment? Why are we reforming curricula and instructional practices based largely on what students — who, by definition, are still novices in both content and in understanding how learning actually works — perceive as desirable?

Of course students’ voices matter. Of course engagement matters. But enjoyment is not a reliable proxy for effective learning. Cognitive growth, like physical growth, requires effort - and boredom. In other words, it often requires doing things that are not instantly gratifying. In Jared’s words, when we share the belief that schools are broken:

What do you think? Share your comments here and stay tuned for the second blog post of this series.

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Until her retirement at the end of 2019, Dr. Jen Jenkins was Chair of Global Englishes and Founding Director of the Centre for Global Englishes in the Department of Modern Languages and Linguistics at the University of Southampton. Prior to taking up her post at Southampton, she worked at King’s College London, where she designed and directed a Master’s programme in ELT and Applied Linguistics.

From the late 1980s onwards, she was the first scholar to conduct empirical research on the phenomenon of English as a Lingua Franca, beginning with her PhD (1995) and followed by numerous influential publications. Throughout her career, she served on the editorial boards of several international journals. She was Reviews Editor of the International Journal of Applied Linguistics from 2004 to 2009 and was a founding editor of the Journal of English as a Lingua Franca (JELF). She also founded the book series Developments in English as a Lingua Franca (DeGruyter Mouton), which she co-edited with Will Baker. In 2014, she was appointed Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences.

Check out some of her books:

• Get it here

• Get it here

It was during a last-minute, almost emergency trip that I went through the trial by fire that would set the tone for my work from then on. The year was 2020, and basically a week before we had to go on lockdown, I flew to another state for a parents’ meeting — and mothers, uncles, aunts, and grandparents. I had heard so much from both my boss and the school administrators that I should prepare myself for an inquisition, the kind of heated political debate in which a group of journalists tries to dissect the life of someone aiming for the highest public office in the country. I even heard that I might be crucified. But since I love a challenge, I think I was more excited than nervous.

The situation was as follows: a school in a more traditional region of the country had just signed a contract with the company I worked for so that we could implement a bilingual curriculum there. However, only a few weeks after the program began, many people were dissatisfied and wanted answers. This account was just one of many that followed throughout my journey as a bilingual pedagogical consultant.

Call André to put out a fire at School X

André, we’re going to need a parents’ meeting at that school network

Families want to shut down the program, André. Can you talk to the parents?

As I said, I love a challenge and have always seen these situations as opportunities. With the rapid expansion of bilingual solutions in the market, it’s natural for the education ecosystem — especially school leaders, teachers, and families — to have doubts about bilingualism. It’s common to hear all kinds of concerns and questions from these groups about what bilingualism actually means in children’s lives.

These questions, quite common in our field, when poorly addressed, can generate a great deal of anxiety and even panic. Reflecting on these concerns from school administrators, along with teachers’ insecurity and families’ frustration, is what led me to try to shed some light on the topic.

This is my story, and the story of colleagues who work in bilingual contexts. If you’re reading this, chances are you’re part of this world too. My goal is to share with you the available scientific evidence on what bilingualism does to children’s brains. So buckle up (or should I say “Brace Yourselves”?) because after this post, you’ll be able — at least I hope — to distinguish myths from facts about the bilingual brain.

Let the games begin

What is bilingualism?

I had a professor during my undergraduate studies who used to say:

First, we need to understand the concepts properly

That always stuck with me. The fact is, if we don’t really know what we’re talking about, we’re very likely to make mistakes about the topic. This brief introduction leads me to my third class on bilingualism and cognition with my students at the Pontifical Catholic University of Paraná. In that class, I ask everyone to research the questions discussed in this text and provide answers backed by scientific evidence — not something they just made up. This is also my approach in many meetings I serve as a firefighter - if you catch my drift. It usually starts like this:

PARENT: But my child is taking too long to become bilingual.
ME: What do you mean?
PARENT: He’s been in the program for a year and can’t translate what I ask. And his accent isn’t right.
ME: So, for you, being bilingual means being able to translate everything someone asks and having the “right accent”?
PARENT: Of course. I think he thinks too much before translating. He needs to think in English.
ME: Where did you get that idea from exactly?
PARENT: I watched a video from a course on YouTube.
ME: But is that video based on what neuroscience and second language acquisition studies say? Cognitive psychology, perhaps?

From that point on, the conversation changes tone, and I can explain some important things. First, the idea of bilingualism as the ability to translate anything into the additional language doesn’t make much sense. Neuroscience actually shows us that bilingual brains share mental concepts across both languages. That means the feeling of “it’s on the tip of my tongue” is often more frequent, because bilinguals can access the concept, but sometimes the word slips away — this also happens to monolinguals, just less often.

Second, you simply can’t stop thinking in Portuguese. We can’t “turn off” a language in our heads — especially our first language — to start thinking in another one. That would be like asking someone with no background in astrophysics to start thinking like an astrophysicist! This is where the first myth lies. A bilingual person is not two monolinguals in one body (GROSJEAN, 1982). Bilingualism transforms the brain. Languages are not stored in separate little boxes. They occupy many of the same regions, depending on several factors, especially proficiency level and frequency of use. Bilingualism is dynamic!

Perhaps the worst myth of all is the accent myth. This comes from the idea that children must sound like native speakers — and those uncritical YouTube videos contribute greatly to spreading this notion. But think about it: how can I say someone has the “wrong” accent because they don’t sound like a specific person? I’m from a small town in São Paulo state, Brazil, but I currently live in Goiânia (Midwest). My accent is a mix of countryside São Paulo, the city of São Paulo, with a sprinkle of goianês — pequi-eating style, pronounced “piqui.” I love all these influences, and none is better or superior to another. We shouldn’t say we want our children to sound like native speakers for several reasons, especially:

1. Which native? English doesn’t belong exclusively to the US or the UK. More than 50 countries around the world have English as an official language. And even within the same country or region, accents vary a great deal

2. Native speakers are often the worst communicators in international scenarios when we realize we live in a world where English is used as a lingua franca — a global communication tool.

3. Children are unlikely to interact in the future only with people who share the same accent.

Saying someone has a “wrong” or “worse” accent sounds like discrimination, so we need to be very careful. The ideal focus is intelligibility, that is, the ability to be understood when communicating. Our children need to sound intelligible — that’s what really matters.

But won’t this confuse the child? Won’t it delay speech?

The cutest thing in the world is when a small child comes home saying things like:

MOTHER: What did you learn today, sweetie?
DAUGHTER: I learned how to draw um doguinho (mixing Portuguese and English)

Nothing more natural than experimenting with new tools, right? Imagine a child who takes music lessons. She already plays the flute well and now has started singing and playing the keyboard. Her musical repertoire isn’t limited to the flute alone, but she clearly has more ease or mastery over one instrument than another. When she gets home and has all three instruments available — yes, her voice also counts — she can move between them and see which one fits best depending on the song she wants to play.

This analogy gives us an idea of how bilingualism works in the brain. Because the process is dynamic, it’s extremely common — and expected — to see children making interesting switches. Sometimes they use a whole English word in a Portuguese sentence (this is called code-switching), sometimes they start a word in one language and finish it in another (code-mixing), or they simply use their entire repertoire — now linguistic rather than musical — to communicate with family or friends (this is the idea of translanguaging) (GARCÍA & WEI, 2014).

The idea that being bilingual is harmful, confusing, or even delays development doesn’t make much sense when we realize that bilingualism is the norm in the world. The brain did not evolve to accommodate just one language (PERANI & ABUTALEBI, 2015). I understand that the fear of causing delays or compromising a child’s intelligence is frightening, but studies on cognition and bilingualism have suggested remarkable gains, especially related to three major classes of executive functions:

• Updating — Working Memory

• Shifting — Cognitive Flexibility

• Inhibition — Inhibitory Control

What are these cognitive functions? According to researcher Sabine Doebel, executive functions are related to our incredible ability to consciously control our emotions, thoughts, and actions in order to achieve goals. Studies dating back to 2004, especially led by Canadian pioneer Ellen Bialystok, show that these functions are more developed in bilingual brains. Are there opposing studies? Of course! That’s how science works. Still, the current consensus in the scientific community is that bilingualism brings enormous benefits, despite “confusing” families during children’s early years.

However, more recently, bilingualism seems to be directly involved with an underlying cognitive process that is required for all those executive functions I mentioned. I’m talking about “attention”. Why don’t you watch or listen to the master herself talk about this on the Learning Cosmos podcast?

Perhaps one of the strongest pieces of evidence that bilingualism benefits the brain is the fact that bilingual individuals develop early signs of dementia, such as Alzheimer’s, on average five or six years later than monolinguals. This shows that bilingualism is a powerfully related to neuroplasticity — the brain’s ability to adapt, reorganize itself, form new connections, and keep learning.

But do you have to speak everything in English?

I’ve had the following conversation countless times:

PARENT: But teacher, does everything have to be in English?
ME: Do you or your spouse speak English?
PARENT: No.
ME: Then the answer is no.

Bilingual schools or schools with extended curricula in an additional language have an interesting advantage over private language courses: they increase the number of hours of exposure to the language. And we’ve known for a long time that it’s possible — and effective — to teach an additional language in that language, that is, teaching English in English. That doesn’t mean banning Portuguese from the classroom, not at all. But increased exposure, especially in early childhood, allows children to acquire the additional language in a more natural and unconscious way.

Many families become frustrated because their children are frustrated and say they don’t understand anything the bilingual teachers say. While we understand that frustration, the central pillar of a bilingual curriculum is precisely increasing exposure to the language — which means you can’t translate everything all the time. The secret is patience and trust in the process. Listening comprehension will improve, and children will understand more and more, eventually speaking more fluently.

It’s important to remember that context matters greatly for children — which may explain why they don’t use English as much at home, simply because they’ve never needed to. When they come into contact with someone who speaks only English — a foreigner or even a stuffed toy they think only speaks that language — that’s when we see the magic happen. A multicultural and stimulating environment will certainly bring benefits. So if someone in the family speaks another language, a great idea is to use it with the child as often as possible. If my father had spoken Swedish with me when I was a child, my Swedish today would be infinitely better.

In the end, what I can say is this: bilingualism is not harmful, it doesn’t confuse children, it helps improve cognitive capacity, and it protects the brain for longer. What a wonderful gift for children, don’t you think?

So, what have I learned from this experience as a consultant talking to families and liaising with school managers? Many people think they know something about certain things they really don’t know much about. Instead of being humble and curious, as well as trust the experts, they often choose to be stubborn and even disrespectful in ways that will likely be very negative for the ones they want to protect: their very own children.

My advice: listen to those who study the area and also have those kids’ best interests at heart.

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Episode 19 is very exciting as it brings Dr. Evelina Fedorenko to the show:

Evelina (Ev) Fedorenko is an Associate Professor in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences and an Investigator in the McGovern Institute for Brain Research. She is also affiliated with the Harvard-MIT Program in Speech and Hearing in Bioscience and Technology. Prior to joining MIT, she spent 5 years as faculty at MGH and Harvard Medical School, supported by an NIH Pathway to Independence K99/R00 award. She received a Ph.D. in Cognitive Science from the MIT Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences in 2007 and an A.B. in Psychology and Linguistics from Harvard University in 2002.

Evelina (Ev) Fedorenko aims to understand how the language system works in the brain. Her lab is unpacking the internal architecture of the brain’s language system and exploring the relationship between language and various cognitive, perceptual, and motor systems. To do this, her lab employs a range of approaches, from brain imaging to computational modeling, and works with diverse populations, including polyglots and individuals with atypical brains. Language is a quintessential human ability, but the function that language serves has been debated for centuries. Fedorenko argues that language serves primarily as a tool for communication, contrary to a prominent view that language is essential for thinking.

• Check out her paper “The language network as a natural kind within the broader landscape of the human brain”

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After two “incredible” months in China, I’m back in Brazil, slowly readjusting to my old routine. I have so much to share with you, but I decided to break protocol and focus on something I normally don’t discuss (at least not so directly) on the Learning Cosmos blog. It has to do with why I wrote the word incredible in quotes. See, I absolutely don’t regret going to China to teach educational psychology to future preschool teachers. As a matter of fact, I’d do it again and again and again. I do regret other things, though. This post is about that. It’s about the limits of what we can do well and how we can easily be tricked into accepting lots of projects by fooling ourselves and saying, “Yeah, you can handle it”.

Let’s start with China

On October 13th, at 7:30 am, Chinese local time, I left my hotel wearing a thick black jacket, a black turtleneck shirt, khaki pants, and a navy blue scarf, walked across Renhe Avenue under the attentive and slightly shocked eyes of every Chinese person on their motorized scooters, in their cars, or on foot on my way. After going through two guards, I entered the campus premises and attracted every look wherever I went. I was bursting with excitement, after all, this was my first day of classes, and I was about to meet my students.

Here’s something you should know: the day before, three students were sent to my hotel lobby to wait for me and take me on a tour of the campus. Anyang Preschool Education College was going to be my workplace for the next two months. I was welcomed by Tom (my student’s English name) with excellent English. He showed me around with two other boys (who remained mostly completely quiet), and then I went back to my hotel room thinking about how amazing this experience was going to be.

But I made a mistake. I assumed everyone in my class, and that meant 112 students divided into three groups, could speak some English. At 8 am, the first students started to get into the classroom with their snacks. If you know me, it won’t come as a surprise that I can get quite chatty, especially when I’m anxious. That was my second warning. I asked some students a few questions, but they didn’t answer.

8:25 am, a piano tune starts to play, and the classroom is full. I start with an icebreaker, and I introduce myself. Slowly, it dawns on me that most of my students cannot speak English. There was no one like Tom in the class. In fact, I could tell that most of them had no idea what I was saying.

Enter Google Translate…

To be fair, the university had told me they might struggle, so I had added translations to my slides. But I had no idea I’d need to translate most of what I was saying as well and that almost no one could answer a simple question in English. And Monday was my toughest day. I had 6 classes and poor internet connection, which meant that my translation app wouldn’t work properly, and a lingering feeling that I would have to replan the entire courses (Child Behavior Observation and Research Methods in Education).

Chinese cultural shock

During the first week, having spent many additional hours reworking my lesson plans, I realized that most of my students were constantly on their phones and rarely engaged in conversation with their peers or me. In fact, I had planned lessons to be more student-centered and added many pair and group work moments in my classes. Those did not work as well as I had planned.

The frustration only grew after week 1. I understood that the language barrier and the cultural differences had to be overcome somehow, and I worked diligently over the next 7 weeks to ensure that my students would learn as effectively as they could. But China wasn’t the real challenge.

The other ongoing projects

As an educational consultant, it is not unusual for me to be involved in several projects at the same time. I have always (or at least mostly) done a good job and received praise for my work. However, this is when things got a little out of hand: early to mid-November.

Just so you know, I was teaching private classes to two students, two classes at university on the Science of Learning, Language, Bilingualism, and Cognition, two language/teaching methodology classes to a group of Italian teachers, and two live sessions (that quickly became four) to Jordanian teachers on English Language Teaching. On top of that, there was a major document review that required my expertise on teacher training and English Language Teaching.

Oh, and I forgot the Science of Learning Literature review group I joined.

The perfect storm formed. All of those projects happening at the same time. At one point during my short-lived experience in China, I got close to burning out. I was definitely on the brink of having a mental breakdown. I confess I should have said no to some of these projects. So why didn’t I?

1. I thought I could handle them

I bit off more than I could chew, I admit it, but in my mind, most of these projects would only require a few weeks of my time and I had said yes to them before China had been confirmed and, obviously, before I knew how much more work I needed to do in China because of the whole language and culture issue.

2. It looked like I had the time, but…

I had not realized (until too late) that I’d have to work at very unpleasant hours. Due to the time difference, I had to stay up four days of each week until around 3 am. Jordan is 5 hours behind China, Italy was 6, then 7, Brazil is 11, and Canada (Toronto) 13. I kept telling myself that I just needed to juggle this mess for two months and that I could do it.

3. Giving up would look unprofessional

Funny how this sounds paradoxical. But it is true. After committing to these projects, I couldn’t bear the thought of giving them up, as it could damage my professional reputation.

The (heavy) toll

I had made plans for China. I had bought gear to record new podcast episodes there: microphones, accessories, the whole setup. None of it was ever used except at the airports on my way to China. I had to cancel an episode of Chá Pedagógico, a podcast I have with my buddy Rudy Mattiello on YouTube (something that rarely happens.)

I had also imagined myself keeping some kind of routine, which basically involved recording, editing, reading, learning Chinese, and exploring cities. None of that survived my new reality.

Even going to the campus cafeteria became a challenge. I was living and teaching in Tangyin County, in Henan Province, a place where many people had never seen a foreigner in person. Without fully realizing it at first, I became a kind of curiosity on campus. Students would follow me, take photos and videos, and share them online. I felt like a rockstar!

At the beginning, I must confess, I enjoyed the attention. But the novelty quickly became something that reminded me of Beatlemania. Crowds would form wherever I went, and something as simple as getting a meal turned into a public event. Over time, I started avoiding peak hours and busy spaces altogether. I must say it was not out of arrogance or discomfort with people. It was really exhaustion. My meals became irregular (sometimes I had to skip them entirely, at least until I learned how to order online).

The biggest problem was probably that many of my nights ended in the wee hours of the morning, often around 3 a.m., because of online classes and meetings across multiple time zones. On some days, I had to rely on stimulants and even throw some cold water on my face when my participants were in breakout rooms discussing something just to try to keep awake.

I told myself this was temporary and that I could manage it, but teaching itself is quite physically draining. I mean, after long days teaching my Chinese students, trying to get over the language barriers, relying on constant translation (and hoping my connection wouldn’t fail), intense cognitive effort, and endless planning, I admit I felt very tired.

I think my irregular sleep started to show signs after the second week. I noticed I had become more forgetful, my concentration was not the same, and straightforward tasks took much longer than they should have. I often had to spend entire afternoons in my hotel room trying to recover lost sleep.

Even learning Chinese, which was something I had been genuinely excited about, had to be put on hold. There was simply no mental space left. I wanted to find a local teacher on campus, but couldn’t. Some very nice students volunteered to teach me, but everyone was really busy. That really made me sad and frustrated. I started a whole podcast and blog post series here about learning Chinese, and I had to abandon the project.

To make matters worse, at one point in late mid-November, it became nearly impossible to connect to my usual tools (Zoom, Google, etc). I think it was the combination of poor internet connectivity at the hotel after midnight and the Chinese Great Firewall. Some of my Zoom sessions were compromised; I had to turn off my camera, and even then, sometimes I had to accept that I simply couldn’t connect that day and had to reschedule.

Human connection was another struggle. I’m an extremely friendly and curious person and managed to impress some people with my basic Mandarin skills. However, almost nobody spoke English and it was hard to make friends. The few friends I made needed to send text messages to WeChat so I could translate them and vice versa. I remember being extremely homesick at one point because I simply missed having a normal conversation with someone who could understand me.

Would I do it again?

Absolutely! Despite the challenges, this has been one of the most incredible and fulfilling work experiences I have ever had.

Teaching in China reminded me, in the most visceral way possible, why I chose this profession in the first place. It had been years since I had spent Teacher’s Day inside a classroom, and celebrating it with more than a hundred students at Anyang Preschool Education College, while talking about the Science of Learning and the importance of evidence-based teaching, was amazingly satisfying and moving. I shared my article on the Learning Cosmos Conceptual Framework, featured on the cover of New Routes magazine, and seeing their genuine interest and excitement was a moment I will never forget.

It also reminded me that good teaching transcends language. Teaching research methods to a group of nearly 100 students who barely spoke my language forced me to focus on the essence. Between translated slides, lots of gestures, Google Translate, and simple hands-on experiments with mystery boxes, making posters, flashcards, and a mascot observation diary project, we managed to understand each other.

There were many lovely moments. Many snacks shared in class. Unexpected free hugs on campus. Balloons, photos, a bear, and even a chicken. The connection reminded me that, despite cultural and linguistic differences, we are not that different after all. We want to learn, to connect, to be seen, to belong, and, of course, to enjoy good food.

So yes, I would do it again. Not because it was easy (it wasn’t). Not because I got everything right (I didn’t). But because it made me grow as a teacher and teacher trainer.

In fact, I was told nearly a hundred times by my students themselves that I had been an exceptional teacher (some even mentioned the best teacher they ever had). To overcome their shyness and language barrier, their final task was to write me a letter that would work as a time capsule. They were supposed to write about what they had learned from me, where they saw themselves in a few years, and any other message they had for their foreign teacher. I had them write the letters in Chinese so they could express themselves to the best of their ability and, most importantly, so that I could not read the letters immediately. I told them I would only read them when I got back to my country.

Here’s one example that illustrates well all other letters:

Dear Teacher Andre:

Hello!

Today is your last class with us. In these eight weeks of course, you taught us so much, and I learned a great deal myself. Thank you for these eight weeks;

They weren’t short, but they weren’t long either. You taught us with 100% passion in every class, teaching us about the behavioral phenomena of preschool children. This will be of great help to our future studies. I am very happy and fortunate to have met you in my university studies. You are my role model, and I hope to become an excellent teacher like you, and I hope my life is as rich and fulfilling as yours. Finally, I want to say that I hope you go further and further on your path of research, reaching even greater heights; and I also hope that you and your wife are happy and fulfilled.

Thank you again for coming; I will always remember you!

December 2, 2025.

Many letters mentioned how handsome I was (hahaha) and how my smile was sunny and warm. Here are other paragraphs that bring tears to my eyes as I read them:

Teacher André, you’re the bravest teacher I have ever met. Coming to a strange city alone, you still managed to inspire us with your enthusiasm!

Actually, I’m not a very studious person, but I looked forward to your class every week. Because of social interactions and busy student life, I sometimes have bad moods, but when I see you and your smile, it seems like all my worries and unhappinnes disappear.

I’m very honored that you remembered my name. It’s such a wonderful coincidence that you came to China, to our school, and that we met. It’s wonderful to know such a humorous, enthusiastic, and cheerful teacher. By the time you read this letter, you may no longer be in China.You might be in Brazil or traveling… But no matter where you read it, I will never forget you, my teacher. We often talked about you, our lovely teacher, after class. It’s a secret, but I’m telling you now.

You’re like the sun; every time I came to your class, I received your friendly greeting, which made me feel that even winter wasn’t so cold with you there. Your classes are very interesting, and even those of us who don’t understand English are happy to participate. I’ve learned so much from you. I admire you and I want to be like you someday: passionate, optimistic, and kind.

I made a point of learning as many names as possible and filmed them holding up their name tags so that I could study the video every day. I can’t guarantee I learned all their names because of the obvious language difficulty, but I’m sure I got close to 95% (way better than their Chinese teachers, they told me)

A final message to myself (and maybe to you too)

Coming back to Brazil, reading those letters slowly and carefully, I realized something important. This experience taught me to be more realistic about my choices. I’m a solo educational consultant who’s about to turn 40 years old. I cannot do it all at once. In fact, doing too much nearly robbed me of the very things that make my work more meaningful. I struggled because I underestimated the cost of saying yes to many projects and across too many time zones.

So if there is one clear lesson I’m taking with me, it is this: I need to limit my projects. The funny thing is that I talk about cognitive overload all the time and ended up making the mistake of confusing commitment with overload. I feel like I let my other partners down in some regards (although I completed all the projects) because I could have done a better job. I want to keep working internationally. I want to keep teaching, researching, writing, and building the Learning Cosmos. But I want to do it in a way that is sustainable, not heroic.

China was definitely a gift. I’d love to go back and teach more students in this incredible country. But if that time comes, I’ll make sure I don’t have too many ongoing projects, and I will check the different time zones multiple times before saying yes to anything else.

I hope I can meet my students again. I told them that I’d love to be reunited with them someday to give them back their letters. I want to see how their lives have changed and let them know how important their message to me was.

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After a couple of weeks, the Learning Cosmos Podcast is back with an incredibly prestigious guest. I had the honor of interviewing Dr. Ellen Bialystok:

Ellen Bialystok is a Distinguished Research Professor of Psychology and Walter Gordon Research Chair of Lifespan Cognitive Development at York University, and Associate Scientist at the Rotman Research Institute of the Baycrest Centre for Geriatric Care. She is an Officer of the Order of Canada and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. Her research uses behavioral and neuroimaging methods to examine the effect of bilingualism on cognitive processes across the lifespan. Her discoveries include the identification of differences in the development of essential cognitive and language abilities for bilingual children, the use of different brain networks by monolingual and bilingual young adults performing simple conflict tasks, and the postponement of symptoms of dementia in bilingual older adults. Among her awards are the Canadian Society for Brain Behaviour and Cognitive Science Hebb Award (2011), Killam Prize for the Social Sciences (2010), York University President’s Research Award of Merit (2009), Donald T. Stuss Award for Research Excellence at the Baycrest Geriatric Centre (2005), Dean’s Award for Outstanding Research (2002), Killam Research Fellowship (2001), and the Walter Gordon Research Fellowship (1999). In 2017 she was granted an honorary doctorate from the University of Oslo for her contributions to research.

• Watch this interview she gave the Brazilian Association of Linguistics:

• Access her pioneering 2004 paper “Bilingualism, Aging, and Cognitive Control: Evidence From the Simon Task” here

• Access a more recent paper (2022): “How does bilingualism modify cognitive function? Attention to the mechanism” here

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Educator, writer, and presenter, Curtis Kelly (EdD), has a life mission: “to reduce the suffering of the classroom.” He writes materials for “3L” students with Low ability, Low confidence, and Low motivation, including Active Skills for Communication (Cengage), Writing from Within (Cambridge), and Significant Scribbles (Longman). He was a professor at Kansai University in Osaka and was recently a Teaching Fellow in Harvard’s, The Neuroscience of Learning, his favorite research topic. He is the founder of the Japan Association for Language Teaching (JALT) Mind, Brain, and Education SIG, and produces the MindBrainEd Think Tanks magazine.

• Check out the Mind, Brain, & Education ORG:

• Check out the latest issue of the MindBrainEd Think Tank:

• Check out his book:

• Check out his course: The Neuroscience of Language Learning

• Check out Nik Peachey’s website “Peachey Publications”

This is week 2 of the Learning Chinese journey, and I wanted to address a question I’m asked frequently. In fact, when I visit schools in Brazil as an educational consultant, I often hear parents, while talking to a front desk employee, blurt out the (in)famous question:

What method does the school use?

And that’s not even the worst. I cringe when private teachers claim they have created their own method. Their “method”, they say, is better than anyone else’s because it’s based on:

Take your pick

1. neuroscience

2. years of experience living in the country

3. research conducted by a mysterious, often nameless, scientist from Harvard (or MIT)

4. personal enlightenment

5. a secret traditional schools (or teachers) don’t want you to know

I even wrote about these claims of “creating one’s own method” in this blog. Here’s an excerpt:

“In fact, you might not know this, but this obsession with finding the perfect method in ELT is old. In Jack Richard and William Renandya’s Methodology in Language Teaching: An Anthology in Current Practice (2020), the first chapter was written by H. Douglas Brown, and it starts like this:

“In the century spanning from the mid-1880s to the mid-1990s, the language teaching profession was involved in what many pedagogical experts would call a search. That search was for a single, ideal method, generalizable across widely varying audiences, that would successfully teach students a foreign language in the classroom”

After all, what method am I using?

Well, well, well. I hope you don’t take me as a hypocrite. I did mention at the beginning of this journey that I would use Science of Learning strategies to help me learn more effectively. So, in a way, I’m using a method based on neuroscience and psychology. But, before we go further and I can answer the question about what method I’m using, we need to focus on the differences between APPROACH and METHOD. Here’s an excerpt from my book “The Owl Factor: Reframing your Teaching Philosophy”

Let’s focus on teaching. An approach sets the beliefs and ideals teachers should embrace. Here we can think of words such as constructivism – when students are regarded as co-constructors of their knowledge and, thus, active agents – or behaviorism – which regards students as passive individuals who learn from external stimuli or reinforcement mechanisms (Hedlund, 2020). A method provides teachers with a set of procedures to follow in their classes, therefore it should have different stages with different aims.

That being said, let’s look at two major concepts in Language Teaching.

1. Audiolingual Method

In the 1950s and 1960s, the Audiolingual Method rose to prominence. It was shaped by the theories of behaviorism and structuralism and rooted in the so-called “Army Method” of World War II. The whole point was to develop quick oral proficiency through intensive drills (and that means lots of repetition), memorized dialogues, an implicit take on grammar (taught or noticed through models), and the strict use of the target language in class. Speech was prioritized over writing, and students progressed from sounds to words to sentences in a bottom-up system.

So, basically, in an audiolingual lesson, the teacher says something like:

-I EAT

Then all the students repeat that in unison. The teacher repeats it a few more times (translating it) and then works on some vocabulary to go with that:

-BREAD, CHEESE, HAM, etc.

Then the teacher gets students to form sentences like:

-I EAT BREAD, I EAT CHEESE, I EAT HAM.

The teacher might add a few extra phrases or conjunctions:

-AND, IN THE MORNING, EVERY DAY

Then the sentences get a little bit more complex, like:

-I EAT BREAD AND CHEESE, I EAT HAM IN THE MORNING, I EAT CHEESE EVERY DAY

And we can see how behaviorism was the main source of inspiration here. Correct responses would be rewarded, while errors would be immediately corrected. It makes sense if we consider habit formation.

2. Communicative Language Teaching Approach

According to Jack Richards in “Communicative Language Teaching Today”:

Communicative language teaching can be understood as a set of principles about the goals of language teaching, how learners learn a language, the kinds of classroom activities that best facilitate learning, and the roles of teachers and learners in the classroom

He goes on:

Communicative language teaching sets as its goal the teaching of communicative competence […] While grammatical competence is an important dimension of language learning, it is clearly not all that is involved in learning a language since one can master the rules of sentence formation in a language and still not be very successful at being able to use the language for meaningful communication

That means instead of mechanical habit formation through drills and memorization, CLT emphasizes things like interaction, collaboration, and the negotiation of meaning. So we can say that learners will make progress by “trying the language out”, so to speak. That is, when students experiment with the language and receive feedback (input), they’ll expand their communicative competence.

What does that look like in a real classroom? Teachers will often take on the role of facilitators and guides, while students work together in pairs and groups to create meaningful exchanges and, most importantly, to use (produce) the target language. That also means trying to strike a balance between fluency and accuracy, depending on the activity, always bearing in mind the idea of purposeful communication.

What's the verdict?

Which approach should we embrace? What method can speed up things when it comes to language learning? Well, I should probably start by saying that people generally cannot become incredibly proficient in a matter of weeks or even months. I wrote about it in the blog:

The Audiolingual Method began to decline by the late 1960s as both research evidence and new theories of language learning challenged its foundations. Noam Chomsky’s critique of behaviorism was particularly influential, as he argued that language learning was not habit formation but a creative process guided by innate structures of the mind - he even had a name for the device responsible for acquiring a language (the famous Language Acquisition Device - LAD). Cognitive psychology also emphasized the importance of understanding over rote memorization, showing that students needed deductive explanations and meaningful context to internalize language. Studies further revealed that ALM students often failed to develop spontaneous fluency, especially in reading and writing, when compared to learners taught by more traditional or communicative approaches.

That’s what’s quite prevalent today, by the way. Go to any major language academy or your neighborhood’s English school, and chances are they’re using the communicative language teaching approach. But it’s worth mentioning that, although the audiolingual method has lost its popularity, its legacy persists in modern classrooms (just think of drills, pronunciation practice, dialogues, and lots of repetition. These are still used as supportive activities, but now they are integrated into eclectic, communicative frameworks rather than serving as the core of instruction.

I’m being eclectic. And there are elements to consider, too. As Curtis Kelly, my guest on the Learning Cosmos Podcast, puts it:

Learning […] to use the words of my friend Robert Murphy, “Emotion drives learning”. […] I studied Japanese in America before I went to Japan. I knew it would be important, but my brain said “naaah, this is … no, no… forget it”. Then I arrived in Japan and in order to eat, I had to speak Japanese. And suddenly, all of these words would flow into my head… I didn’t have to study so much

In other words, as the Mind, Brain, and Education Science principle goes:

Learning is what the brain does

Whether we adopt this or that method based on this or that approach, we can learn. We’ve all seen it happen. People have learned (and are still learning) languages following different paths.

Want to check out my path? Watch the video below.

This season kicks off with a deep dive into language learning and bilingualism, featuring one of the world’s leading voices in the field:

Antonella Sorace (Laurea, University of Rome; MA, University of Southern California; PhD, University of Edinburgh) is Professor of Developmental Linguistics at the University of Edinburgh and Honorary Professor at University College London. She is a Fellow of the British Academy, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, a Fellow of the Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce, and a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. In her career she has held research appointments and visiting professorships at numerous institutions, including the University of Utrecht, the University of Trondheim, the University of Tromsø, the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Johns Hopkins University, Michigan State University, the University of Hamburg, and the University of Siena.

Her research focuses on a number of interrelated questions that bring together linguistics, experimental psychology and cognitive science, and her research achievements and publications span different sub-fields of scientific enquiry. She is a world leading authority on bilingualism over the lifespan and is particularly well known for her studies of exceptionally talented ("near-native") adult second language speakers; for her research on the changes ("attrition") that take place in the native language of advanced second language speakers; for her investigation of bilingual language acquisition in early and late childhood, and of the effects of bilingualism in non-linguistic domains.

She is also internationally known for her contribution to language typology, especially for her research on constrained variation at the lexicon-syntax interface, which she has investigated in many languages, and her studies of gradience in natural language. Moreover, she has given an important contribution to experimental methods in linguistics by pioneering the use of Magnitude Estimation as a technique for the elicitation of linguistic acceptability judgments. She is committed to disseminating the findings of research on bilingualism outside academia and was awarded a Beltane Fellowship for Public Engagement.

She is the founding director of the non-profit organisation Bilingualism Matters (www.bilingualism-matters.org), which has a wide international network of branches all over the world, including one in Edinburgh (https://www.bilingualism-matters.org/network/edinburgh).

It’s been just a week since I officially started my journey into Mandarin Chinese, and let me tell you, folks, it has been both exciting and humbling. I hadn’t tried to learn a new language in such a long time. The closest experience was trying to use my Spanish (that is more like Portuñol, to be honest) in Peru and Mexico at the beginning of the year. I got by. Actually, I might say I passed with flying colors! I had whole conversations about anything and hardly had any problems.

But Chinese is different. On day one, I opened Duolingo, listened to the cheerful little green owl, that people confuse with Athena, my stuffed owl that travels with me, and repeated “nǐ hǎo” with all the confidence in the world. By day three, though, I realized I couldn’t quite remember how to say “goodbye” without double-checking. Learning a new language is certainly about memorizing words, but it’s also about using them as often as possible so that you stop forgetting them.

As a matter of fact, how is it that people can learn a second (or additional) language? Like I promised, this whole learning Chinese adventure is also an excuse for me to explore the universe or language learning (or should I say acquisition?).

Learning, Acquisition or both?

If you are an English teacher or TESOL student, this might be easy for you. If not, you might be asking: aren’t acquisition and learning the same thing? Not exactly. According to Stephen Krashen, acquisition is the subconscious process of picking up a language naturally, the way children do with their mother tongue. It’s what happens when you hear words in context, understand their meaning, and internalize them without necessarily thinking about grammar rules. Learning, on the other hand, is the conscious process, which usually involves going to a school and explicitly being taught grammar rules, vocabulary, and skills.

In my case, learning seems to apply best. After all, I’m studying the different tones, memorizing characters, practicing stroke order, reading explanations of sentence structures etc. But can I say that I’m also acquiring the language? Well, think about me listening to podcasts and being exposed to the language daily. Is that learning, if I’m not writing things down or analyzing sentence structure or word order?

Here’s the real tough question: can I even stop my brain from wanting to analyze the grammar and other aspects of Chinese when, for instance, I wonder if my “nǐ hǎo” sounds right, while maybe remembering that “hǎo” has a falling-rising tone?

Input versus Output

This brings me to another pair of important concepts: comprehensible input and the output hypothesis. Krashen famously argued that we acquire language when we understand input that is just beyond our current level (i+1). That means listening to short dialogues, watching videos with subtitles, or hearing your teacher explain something in the target language, as long as you can follow along. I get input from reading and listening (receptive skills), so should I just increase contact hours with the language throughout the week to speed up the process? In other words, if I read lots of texts in Mandarin and listen to podcasts or watch videos every day, will that help me master those skills and even speak and write fluently?

One of the significant issues here is that most of the input I get is incomprehensible and I simply can’t speed things up too much because my brain needs time to consolidate memory. I need to build the foundation slowly so that I can understand each dialogue more and more as the days go by. I’ve noticed this when watching simple Mandarin YouTube videos. Even when I watch tutorials on useful phrases, I might feel that I caught every word, or that the context provided enough to make sense of what’s going on. But then, I can’t remember much the next day and I can’t speak more spontaneously.

Merrill Swain added that input isn’t enough. Her Output Hypothesis showed that learners need to produce language (to speak, to write) in order to notice what they don’t know and, when I think about the Science of Learning, that makes perfect sense. Remembering the meaning of a word (semantic memory) isn’t the same as knowing how to use this word in a sentence or a conversation (especially considering that I must also remember word order and tones).

So, what does this mean for me, one week into Mandarin? It means I need that exposure that will help me absorb the rhythm, tones (the musicality so to speak), and patterns of Chinese, and the practice that forces me to try, fail, try again and refine. I know I’m not going to achieve fluency in a few weeks. But I might learn just enough if I combine listening and reading a little bit every day with the discipline of practicing and producing (that’s what Duolingo and Google Translate are for).

I know I’m building a foundation without which I cannot truly learn. “我是老师 - Wǒ shì lǎoshī” means “I am a teacher”, but it feels great to be a student again.

Watch the video to know more about the strategies I’m using and make sure you visit the Learning Cosmos Education Hub if you want to access more materials.

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Big news! I’ve been invited to teach a course to first-year students of the Language Education program at Anyang Preschool Education College in China! This means I’ll be moving to the city of Anyang for two months at the end of this year.

I can't tell you how exciting this is. I'm sure it will be an enriching experience, and I can't wait to meet my students. Knowing that I’ll be contributing to the development of future Chinese teachers makes me feel both honored and proud.

Anyang is located in Henan Province in central China.

According to VisitAnyang.com:

Discover the ancient roots and enduring spirit of China in Anyang. This city, cradle of East Asian Civilization and birthplace of Chinese Writing, has thrived for 3300 continuous years. Experience Anyang, where history unfolds, culture thrives, and the future beckons. Anyang: A city whispering to the soul.

Besides its breathtaking beauty (just look at the photos I got from trip.com below), the most exciting part of this trip to me is Anyang’s cultural heritage.

A Historical City

Perhaps, what best represents Anyang’s rich cultural heritage is one of its most important museums: the Yinxu Museum. Located at the Yin Ruins in Anyang, Henan Province, China, Yinxu is dedicated to the Shang Dynasty. The museum showcases its rich collection of archaeological relics, such as bronzeware, pottery, jade objects, and the famous oracle bones. The site itself is the former capital of the Shang Dynasty and was inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2006, representing the pinnacle of 20th-century Chinese archaeological discovery. The site is famous for the discovery of oracle bones with inscriptions that form the earliest known form of Chinese writing.

My job at Anyang Preeschool Education College

I’ll be in charge of teaching junior students preparing to teach young learners. According to the UniRanks website:

Anyang Preschool Education College focuses on early childhood education. […] The college emphasizes practical skills and knowledge necessary for teaching young children. The curriculum integrates hands-on training with theoretical understanding, preparing students for careers in preschool education. The college fosters a supportive learning environment that encourages collaboration and innovation

The modules I’ll be teaching will address Children’s Behavior, Classroom Management, English Language teaching Methodology, and Research Methods in Language Education. I intend to share some insights on this blog so that you can keep up with my journey.

My journey

There’s just one tiny detail. I can’t speak Chinese. Actually, I couldn’t. Not a word till a month ago. Even though I’ll be delivering my lessons in English, I figured that learning some basic Chinese would be a good idea. I knew Mandarin was a very different language and that it wouldn’t be easy, but I do like a challenge. That’s exactly why I started documenting my learning journey so that I can share a few things with you.

1. How do people learn languages anyway?

My objective here is to help anyone interested in language learning - or should I say “acquisition”? - to better understand what this endeavor entails. What are some of the fundamental concepts in Second Language Acquisition (SLA), Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL), Linguistics, and Bilingual Education, including Bilingualism and Cognition?

Ever heard of Comprehensible Input, Universal Grammar, Communicative Approach, Audiolingualism, Critical Periods, Interlanguage, Translanguaging, Native-speakerism, Lingua Franca, Lexical Access, or Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL)? Well, my job will be to demystify these and other important concepts.

The best part is that this will be in line with the second season of the Learning Cosmos Podcast. In season 1, I had the pleasure of interviewing amazing Science of Learning experts such as Henry Roediger, the Bjorks, John Sweller, Tracey Tokuhama-Espinosa, Barbara Oakley and more! Season 2 will be all about language learning and I’ve already interviewed incredible experts in language education, TESOL, bilingualism, teacher training, etc. Stay tuned for upcoming episodes soon!

2. I’ll be the Guinea Pig

Since I believe in walking the talk - and especially because I didn’t think anyone would accept this challenge on my behalf - I’m recording and editing every step of my learning journey. What you should know is that:

• I’m a 39-year-old man

• I’m fluent in English, German, Spanish, and can speak a little French, Swedish, and Italian

• I’m extremely busy so I’ll be dedicating about 20-30 minutes a day to Chinese

• I will also learn how to write (after all, I’m going to the birthplace of Chinese writing!)

• I won’t be getting a teacher at this point because I want to see how far I can go by myself in 2 months

• I really didn’t know any Mandarin before starting this journey

3. The Science of Learning is my ally

I’m also implementing Science of Learning strategies to help me reach my goal (that means a lot of retrieval practice and spaced repetition). In fact, I’m using the tips shared by the experts I interviewed in season 1 of the Learning Cosmos Podcast.

The question I’m asking here is whether it is possible to speed up the process - at least a little bit - and how effective those promises we come across on social media are. Can people learn in just a few weeks? Is grammar really unnecessary? Are there apps or methods based on neuroscience that can boost my learning?

Well, why don’t you watch the first video below and stay tuned for my weekly progress videos?

Oh, there’s more! If you want to have access to the whole process along with extra materials and discussions on language learning and bilingualism, leave a comment here and I’ll send you more information about how you can become a member of the Learning Cosmos Education Hub. You’ll get access to online courses, a community for teachers, reading clubs, exclusive live sessions, and more!

For now, that’s it, everyone. I’m very excited to share this journey with you. Why don’t you join me and start learning an additional language too?

再见 - bye bye!

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