Neuroscientific Education: a Multidisciplinary Approach to Second Language Acquisition.

The aim of this work is to suggest guidelines for a research project whose field of investigation emerged from a close collaboration between different disciplines, such as neuroscience, psycholinguistic, educational sciences, psychology, field to which the related literature refers using the expression: “Neuroscientific Education” [12]. This program analyzes problems and phenomena that are associated to children's development, to their cognitive abilities and to their learning modalities. It uses different levels of analysis (neurophysiological, psychological, linguistic), with the aims of finding methodologies and didactic teaching methods that are appropriate, effective and able to integrate the contributions coming from different perspectives. We intend to investigate the phenomenon of second language (L2) 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, thematizing the relative adequacy of existing teaching methods and proposing, on the basis of real products through the creation of linguistic databases, possible alternatives, taking into account the numerous and elaborate plans that include this phenomenon. In relation to these levels and to the fact that exactly at this initial phase of cognitive growth is more natural to speak of acquisition and learning rather than teaching a language, a crucial step in this work, especially in order to develop appropriate teaching methods, will be the analysis of the role played by elements such as: attention, memory, neurobiological structures and the related cerebral constraints, emotion and language input, in the cognitive growth and in the second language acquisition.