We are learning all the time, we learn from the very beginning of our lives and

continue increasing our knowledge and developing skills during the whole life.
Scientist had been researching about how does the brain changes while we are
learning a second language.
Using different technological resources such as magnetic resonance imagining
(MRI) and others, they can observe the parts of the brain that have different
changes.
In controlled situations, they made a diagnosis about their study, they got to know
that individuals that are L2 have a growing rather in certain brain areas as well as
cortex and hippocampus that are related to language learning. These areas are
linked to students ability to learn a foreign language.
With the new technological sources, scientist realized that sometimes Japanese
students could not distinguish some sounds while listening; in this case brain
areas that are needed to perceive and decode the sound as a letter, was not work
as expected. By using special software, they could obtain a different result by
exaggerating this sounds to get students to listen to those sounds that in their own
language are not differentiated.
Scientific researching in language studies will promote the use of technology for
second language learning. Ultrasound might be useful to teach phonetics by
explaining how to make sounds by showing the movements that tongue, lips and
jaw do to articulate a sound.
Probably in the present we are not in the position to get this technology to use it in
a classroom, but software engineers are working on it to capitalize this knowledge
and make new apps for language learning.

Another investigator Sara Morgan developed a different kind of experiment by

teaching some volunteers to use a mini-language (developed by linguists) to probe

its learnability in a controlled situation. Two groups were showed to learn using
different strategies; the first group, learned by explanations of language rules (the
same way as we teach here in Mexico), the second group learned by immersion,
the same way as we learn our native languages. Although all the volunteers
learned, it showed out that after six months without being exposed to this
language, because it was artificial, their brains processes were alike native
speakers and they hadnt forgotten how to use this language.
Short said: This brain-based research tells us not only that some adults can learn
through immersion, like children, but might enable us to match individual adult
learners with the optimal learning context for them.
All these researching help us to generate new guidelines to follow considering our
cognitive abilities using formal instruction, so structured with rules and otherwise
total immersion in the language.
Now we know that bilingual people have improved their capabilities in different
ways, they are mentally flexible, they have better memories and they are more
cognitively creative.
Some Canadian studies demonstrated that knowing a second language is a good
way to stay cognitively healthy until we get old.