Re: (teach) adults learning like children (was Bedtime stories)

>A good bit of research has supported the fact that brain plasticity/flexibil ity decreases with age>

Some of the cognitive literature, possibly pointing to a connectionist model of brain function, has given me hope that connections in the brain are set by motivational stimuli.  I could bet that a motivated language student could distinguish all the sounds in a particular language given the right guided exercises.  No guidance is necessary to distinguish the gross sounds, especially if they are similar to those in the native language.  Guidance is needed for the sounds that are close enough in the new language that they wouldn't produce a difference in meaning in the native language.

There is a group out of Utah that sends (mostly young Mormons) to different places around the world to teach K-3 kids.  Their methodology is to create different environments (kitchen, classroom . .) with genuine realia that they cart in their suitcases from the U.S.  I've seen the results at my school in Wuhan.  What they are doing with young kids, and without any long-term training(!) is to effectively block out stimuli that do not account for being logically including in the classroom patter as part of a particular set of vocabulary items and sentence constructions.  What you have left is a limited amount of 'high energy' information that is easy to remember because of its uniqueness in the created classroom environment.
Nelson Bank

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