The Cone Of Learning Applied To Languages (edgard Dale)

Emotional Intelligence:

Successful students don´t conceive learning a language as something hard or difficult, full of mental effort. For them it is a stimulant and fun challenge. The logical consequence is: With pleasure, they put time on it. They immerse themselves in the new language with passion and intensity.

Strategies:

Students that reach an excellent level in one or two foreign languages don´t have a bigger brain or more neurons. They simply organize better the learning process, they manage better their emotions and process better the information.

Gradual Learning

High level of autonomy. Know how to direct the learning process, capable of taking the right decisions. They are not messy or flighty. They don´t fill up their brain with many words per session that they can learn in a long term. They don´t try to understand all the words in a new text or document. Don't try to learn words or phrases that are not appropriate with their level. They have their own criteria to decide what words to look for in the dictionary and which one to leave on a side, which are indispensable and which are not. Before using the dictionary they try to work it out with the context, activating their capacity to think. They don't reject difficulty, but they also know that they level is +1. That is to say, the very easy don't make you learn, the excessively difficult can overtake you, be too much if you don't know how to adapt the task to your level and take on feasible tasks, for example: Not to understand 100% of the text if not figure out certain information.

Immersion:

They look out for opportunities to learn the language in a natural way: using it. To listen songs, watch movies, read book, articles. They are not afraid of the original texts, the ones of real life, not the ones done for learning books. The challenge is stimulant, they know how to use strategies to understand as much as they can with the level of language they have, and the successful experience stimulates their confidence to continue. They know how to follow: with a text or movie, they grasp what they have learnt and from there they take on board all the elements that help (context, images, titles)