Educational neuroscience and second language acquisition: a multidisciplinary perspective.

The scientific movement named “Neuroscientific Education” (Petitto & Dunbar, 2004; Pattern & Campbel, 2011; Shrang, 2011) has the aim to create a cooperation between neuroscience and education with the common purpose of developing teaching methods supported by the deep knowledge of the functioning of brain and mind. Different levels(neurophysiological, psychological and linguistic) are used to analyse problems and phenomena that are associated to children's development, to their cognitive abilities and learning modalities, with the specific goal to find methodologies and didactic teaching methods that are effective in facilitating learning of any cognitive abilities that is the target of the teaching action. In this work we want to investigate the phenomenon of first (L1) and second (L2) language acquisition in the first five years of life, in relation with the different problems linked to language and cognition that are reliable to the acquisition of a L2. The final aim is to study the adequacy of existing teaching methods and to propose possible alternatives, even through the creation of a linguistic databases and taking into account the numerous and different plans that this phenomenon includes. In this perspective we will analyze the role played by elements such as: attention, memory, neurobiogical structures and the related cerebral contraints, emotion and language input, in the cognitive growth and in the L2 acquisition.