Cognitive Teaching: Importance of Cognitive Neuroscience in the Teaching of Foreign Languages

For a long time ago, man has sought to understand the mental processes in reasoning, decision making, learning and other mental activities. But the scientific study of the human mind began a few decades ago with the advent of cognitive science. In order to be update and have access to new developments, some sciences tend to cognitive science as the use of the term ‘cognitive’ shows it and amongst them we can mention ‘cognitive psychology’, ‘cognitive linguistics’, ‘cognitive neuroscience’, and so on. Language teaching, as an interdisciplinary science, should take advantage of contributions from cognitive science to develop and to use them in practice. At first, it may seem a little hard to make a direct link between language teaching and cognitive science. For cooperation and integration of language teaching and cognitive science, the approaches of several subfields such as ‘cognitive psychology’, ‘cognitive neuroscience’ and ‘cognitive linguistics’ sound significant. The passage of the current teaching strategies to learning with cognitive landscape raises the questions that it must clarify them. In this article, based on a descriptive-analytic methodology, we sought to answer two questions: To what extent could cognitive neuroscience provide the theoretical basis for cognitive learning? To what extent could the teaching-learning approach based on the brain be used in language teaching? In this study, it is argued that the implications of cognitive science go beyond theoretical aspects. Language teaching can apply them in several cases including the methodology of teaching. Cognitive science provides a solid basis for practice and language teaching, for example, the knowledge and use of the principles of teaching and learning based on the brain can be very helpful in the process of teaching-learning foreign languages.