Greetings to all, 

I was very pleased to see Tom's post about the skepticism even some in the field of neuroscience are expressing with respect to its ability to meaningfully inform educational practices.  Further, Hugo brought up a once powerful movement in psychology (behaviorism) that really also dominated second and foreign language instruction in its heyday and continues to do so to this day at some renowned private language schools and language software series (even though behaviorism has been dismissed at least in applied linguistics and second language acquisition a long, long, time ago to be replaced by cognitive psychology). 

It seems that much of what we are discussing is at least as closely tied into assessment practices, language acquisition, and reading & writing development as it is (even though somewhat opaquely at this juncture) to "learning disabilities." I wonder whether other topic area list subscribers are and/or could be benefiting from this discussion strand?  I cannot help but reiterate that I wish there were some kind of NIFL discussion list topic area having to do with the foundations and principles of education itself - or should we copy some messages to the ALA list?

Michael 

Michael A. Gyori 
Maui International Language School 
www.mauilanguage.com



      
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