ELT News Think Tank

This Month's Think Tank Panel

Marc Helgesen

Curtis Kelly

Panelists: Marc | Curtis
Date: September 2003

Topic: "What role do the senses play in language learning?"

Multisensory Learning Utilizes our Brains as Multiprocessors

Curtis Kelly

In the previous Think Tank, I discussed how songs build better brains, and music leads to faster language learning. Use of song is part of the elementary education directive, and every elementary teacher knows that the more senses you bring into language input, the deeper the learning. The theory is that the more ways information is cued for retrieval - through movement, sound, vision, touch and even smell - the easier it is to recall later.

Smell? Indeed, smell appears to be the most powerful sense in relation to memory. In one study, a teacher burned jasmine incense sticks while teaching. He gave tests later with half of his students in a normal classroom and half in a room with incense burning. The latter group got higher scores (and they probably felt better too).

“a brain is not just a gathering of separate soloists, it is a jazz quartet”

As Francis Crick and others have pointed out, multisensory input works because the human brain is a multi-processor. To limit input to one channel, especially the linear, structured, predictable way we tend to serve up school learning, is robbing the brain of its natural potential. No wonder so many of our students seem bored, frustrated, and underachieving.

Brains are, in fact must be, active all the time. Even visually, they register over 36,000 cues per hour, while at the same time running our respiratory, circulatory, emotional and other systems. As Robert Sylwester describes it, a brain is not just a gathering of separate soloists, it is a jazz quartet. Different musicians play different instruments, but they all improvise on a single theme in order to make a unified song.

Learning too, occurs in a complex, non-linear, cooperative fashion, as our brains process multi-modal and multi-path experiences. Eric Jensen writes that some researchers believe that there is very little learning the brain can do best in an orderly, sequential fashion, such as just hearing or reading about a subject. We are equipped with massive parallel processors, so we handle complex subjects better with rich, multisensory input.

Consider. How did you become such a good teacher? By just reading books? Of course not. The sounds, sights, feelings, movements and even the smells of the hands-on classroom experience were crucial in that learning endeavor.

Therefore, the answer to the question of what role senses play in learning is "every role," and maybe our educational reductionism is why some of our students are doing so poorly: their brains are too varied and powerful. After all, why would anyone use a jazz quartet to conjugate verbs?

Panelists: Marc | Curtis

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Curtis Kelly, Heian Jogakuin University

Author of Writing from Within

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