COGNITIVE ACCESIBILITY IN FOREIGN LANGUAGE LEARNING AND IMPROVEMENT OF LINGUISTIC ATTITUDES AND EXECUTIVE FUNCTIONS

Cognitive accesibility is the basic requirement for labels, displays, technology and pictograms in order to provide full informationt to population.  Cognitive accessibility allows inclusion of any individual by making the society more comprehensable. The context is more accesible and students in the school feel more comfortable along the teaching-learning process, then linguistic attitudes towards L2 (English) improves. Cognitive accesibility takes part of universal accessibility with others such as physical and sensory accessibility. This phenomenon makes  a Universal Design for Learning then, students with functional diversity are more included in the school context. The first document in Spain which talks about cognitive accessibility was a proposal made by the Spanish Blind and Visually Impaired  Foundation (ONCE in Spanish). This Organization stated the importance of cognitive accessibility to people with sensory functional diversity regarding urban spaces. This supposes the empowerment of space to include all human beings.  Then, spaces have a space vocabulary to improve autonomy and active presence of all citizens. This view breaks the Maze Effect which is a crucial component of stress and confusion which make people reduce their participation in society. However, the nature of learning a second language had taken this principle yet. The acquisition of learning a second language implies acessibility cognitive processes to involve students in an active way. The earthshaking of accomplishing students’ involvement in learning implies a set of teaching interventions based on experiential lessons by planning a variety of resources according to different learning styles and paces in an inclusive context of learning a new language. However, if we take recent research, inclusive education seems to just influence on students with SEND with a limited approach to inclusion but with a universal design for learning in lessons (Núñez-Vázquez and Crismán-Pérez, 2021). Obviously, these are contradictory ideas if we wish to achieve a full inclusive education in school context. Then, this paper is a review of cognitive accessibility in school context taking teaching intervention of Foreign Language Learning to expand its methodology to all subjects and flourish cognitive accessibility from a Cognitve Space Safety taking goals such as reduction of memorisation as a tool to recall information, taking the most of multisensory displays to reduce the students’ anxiety in learning due to the importance of executive functions (EFs) wich is the capacity to play with ideas; spending time to think before acting; meeting novel, unanticipated challenges; resisting temptations; and staying focused (Diamond, 2013). Cognitive accessibility achieves the improvement of executive functions by making information understandable, then stimulation is provided in an implicit way with an active participation of all students in lessons as a basic requirement of communicative apporach in foreign language lessons to boost positive linguistic attitudes towars L2 (foreign language).

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