COGNITIVE FACTORS APPLIED EFFECTIVELY IN THE EFL LESSON PLANNING by Ivonne Londoño

English as a foreign language (EFL) classroom is a place where a lot of situations happen, but they are mostly correlated to human interactions, knowledge development, growth of social abilities, strengthening of linguistic skills, communication practice, acquisition and others. However, sometimes the teacher’s lesson planning and the class environment are isolated from the brain processes and factors that have a tremendous influence in the learning and teaching progresses. While, some think these topics would be complex for every teacher and will be time consuming during the class planning, these factors could reinforce and facilitate learning processes and the acquisition of a second language.
Furthermore,  cognitive factors such as verbal intelligence, phonological and long term memory represent a meaningful category in the EFL class arrangement. The task will be more than planning grammar drills, skills practice for two hours of a lesson. the indication is to cover all areas in knowledge insights starting from the brain. 
Verbal intelligence  is the ability to solve different problems presented in language-based communication with a deep reasoning; Phonological factors depends on the pronunciation and its representation with meaning. Finally the long term memory plays a noticeable role in education because is the continuous storage of information in which the mind accepts those significant memories and avoid  others.
These factors could enhance the activities through using teaching strategies like: Storytelling, brainstorming, writing and publishing; these verbal tasks will develop more than one skill making the student able to use the words well when use the production skills (writing and speaking). Also, in the acquisition of a second language verbal intelligence can be experienced in higher levels of English where  the  reasoning of a language appears and  word  retention, persuasive skills, debating, being able to explain concepts and use conversational  humor  are  performance indicators.
Above all, the idyllic result in a second language classroom is having a near-native communication  as much as possible. But the training  required to reach this goal is challenging. That is why, phonological factors together with the four skills can determine the key of academic success in the acquisition of the second language sounds and pronunciation. Meanwhile, the main problem at school is the intervention of the first language in the second language learning for the reason that learners tend to confuse some phonation characteristics  with their  mother tongue. Nevertheless,  linguistic awareness as a result of  appropriate teaching strategies will alleviate the weaknesses in this area. For example the intervention with:  sound production, recognition, repetition, modeling, choral readings, reading out loud  and the use of web tools definitely will help teachers plan  their tasks.

In spite of the two factors mentioned before, the main worldwide concern in education is the problem in students concepts retention involving memory issues and low grading rates. Long term memory is described as the way we as human beings save information for a long period of time. It occurs when  information received in the brain make some connections between the abstract and the concrete ideas we already have in mind.  In education, one of the types of long term memory that must be strengthened is   semantic memory where  concepts, meanings and understanding are a collection of factual information about a study object. One way to promote long-term memory in the classroom is (Sprenger, 2002) planning enriched lessons where the student can be motivated, focus and keep their attention, take into account their  prior knowledge, let them rewrite concepts as they understood, ask them high level activities, make a review (Recycling Activities) and finally ask them to retrieve those memories.
To summarize, in spite of the intricacy of including these three cognitive factors in our lesson plans,  we teachers should encompass  in all our pedagogical, society and community duties, the neurological profound understanding of everything that happens inside the English classroom.

References
http://www.educationworld.com/a_curr/profdev/profdev156b.shtml
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_memory
http://psychology.about.com/od/eindex/g/episodic-memory.htm
http://psychology.about.com/od/memory/f/long-term-memory.htm
http://www.educationworld.com/a_curr/profdev/profdev156b.shtml

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