Устойчивое развитие: язык, межкультурная коммуникация

Along with the aging of the Western population and the problems associated with this aspect, 
the political, economic and social transformations of our society make this new audience interested 
in learning foreign languages. 
Today, speaking a foreign language is almost a necessity, a natural consequence of 
globalization, internationalization, and proximity between peoples. As for our continent, the very 
idea of Europe encourages a radical change in the way of thinking and life on our continent. The 
European Union consists of 27 member States: there are 23 different official languages, although 
many more are actually spoken. 
But, according to Villarini and Grasse, the crucial factor for the spread of languages is the 
narrowing of perceived distances between different peoples, cultures, and idioms. The ease of 
travel, thanks to the very large offer at the level of prices and routes, makes the ability to express 
and understand becomes a necessity. On the other hand, even at home, movies and television, along 
with subtitles of movies or videos transmitted over the Internet, expose most people to foreign 
languages. The consequence is that it is becoming increasingly difficult in our society to avoid 
contact with other languages. 
The increase in the number of older people, the extension of service life, good health, 
combined with the ease of travel and technological progress, seem to be the reasons for the growing 
interest of older people in learning foreign languages. But what difficulties does this audience face 
in their training? Let's try to analyze the changes in the cognitive abilities of older people. 
Understanding how the brain controls language and how aging processes affect the cognitive 
abilities of people over the age of 50 is fundamental to thinking about foreign language didactics 
that are more appropriate for this particular audience. For this reason, we will analyze the effects of 
aging in several aspects: first the sensory, especially vision and hearing, and then the brain, 
especially the ability of attention and memory. 
All authors who have conducted studies of older adults agree that it is important to take into 
account visual and hearing loss. The lack of these two abilities obviously affects the perception of 
external inputs and the ability to respond to these same inputs. On the other hand, it should not be 
forgotten that the aging process is not uniform either for all organs of a given individual, or between 
several individuals, both in terms of the intensity of the deficiency and the age of occurrence of the 
deficiency itself. 
In general, from a visual point of view, there is a deterioration in close-up vision, 
accompanied by a loss of the ability to see details well, a decrease in the field of vision and 
adaptation to penumbra. 
Similarly, there is a change in the perception of sounds, and the authors found a decrease in 
the ability to hear high tones, too fast sounds, and, more generally, to perceive sounds spoken in a 
noisy situation. 
It is important to emphasize that in the above articles, these two shortcomings are not 
considered as an obstacle to learning a foreign language, but rather as factors that must be taken into 
account when implementing and making didactic decisions. In addition, the authors have often 
observed how older students implement compensation and adaptation mechanisms: for example, 
with regard to vision, often a partial reduction in detail does not change the overall vision. On the 
other hand, the experiment helps to restore the missing part. Thus, teachers should take into account 
the quality of the graphics and sound of the materials offered to this audience in order to avoid 
negative consequences for learning. 
Research cited by Villarini and Grasse suggests three main modes of attention: selective 
attention, distributed attention, and constant attention. These three methods denote three types of 
permissions, which we will discuss in detail below: 
- selective attention refers to the ability to identify relevant information between multiple 
pieces of information, such as selecting a pre-defined image among others. Regarding this type of 
memory, Villarini and La Grasse cite research by Robin and Rizzo that shows that students over the 
age of 60 have a longer response time than students between the ages of 25 and 36. 

On the other hand, they also cite studies by Claney and Hoyer that show that this response 
time can be improved with exercise, and that older students use possible sentences more effectively 
than younger students. 
- Distributed attention refers to the ability to do several things at once, such as memorizing a 
list of names and putting them in alphabetical order. It is in this type of research focus they show a 
lack of results on the part of the older students, although they indicate an improvement obtained 
through the exercises. 
- Constant attention, on the contrary, indicates the ability to concentrate on a given task for a 
long period of time. Tests conducted to analyze this ability of attention on the part of older students 
showed that this audience receives more modest results compared to a younger audience, and this, 
according to Tomporowski and Tinsley, either because of the complexity of the task or because of 
less motivation. Indeed, they noticed that when there is less motivation, the level of attention 
decreases significantly. 
In conclusion, the results of various studies of the attention abilities of older people lead 
Villarini and La Grasse to consider three aspects: 
1. older students tend to have less productivity and therefore less attention capacity compared 
to younger students when asked to complete complex tasks in limited time; 
2. exercise and training allow them to improve their performance and therefore their attention 
capacity; 
3. motivation helps to maintain the level of attention: when there are activities that the elders 
consider "interesting", their concentration increases. 
Memory deserves a separate discourse for its complexity and for the enormous importance it 
has in all human activities. As Mario Cardona says: Every action and every learning involves the 
processes of memory. The cognitive, emotional and motivational processes that found our self 
could not exist without memory. So we owe to memory the possibility of being who we are. In fact, 
more that the memory is correct to say different types of memories, saw that at the base of the many 
and complex operations of the mind, there is only a memory, but a complex set of neural circuits 
that control the different memory systems with specific functions are interconnected and 
interacting. 
In reality, as Jean Yves and Marc Tadié say, " it is memory that makes man ". Without 
memory it would not be possible to perform practical activities, such as using a computer or 
walking, nor to perform cognitive activities: above all, without memory there would be no 
language. The study of memory is therefore an area of fundamental importance for language 
acquisition. 
Memory can be studied from different points of view: philosophical, as has been done since 
the age of Aristotle, psychoanalytic, just think of Freud, neurobiological, or psychological. It is 
mainly in these last two areas that we have found research on the role of memory in language 
acquisition. 
First of all it is important to return to the notion that there is no single memory system. This 
statement is confirmed by psychological and neurobiological studies. The best known model speaks 
of three distinct types of memories with specific features that Cardona schematizes thus: 
Context 
Input information 
Sensory registers 
Sight, 
hearing, 
touch, smell, taste 
Short-term 
memory 
= 
working memory 
Long-term 
memory 
= 
episodes, 
concepts etc. 
Information is perceived through the various sensory systems that hold it for an extremely 
limited period of time, from a minimum of one thousandth of a second to a maximum of 3 seconds. 
If after it there is no further elaboration of the information, it is lost permanently. 
The distinction between two types of «memory warehouses» i.e. places of memory storage, 
dates back to the end of the XIX century. Cardona cites William James, one of the fathers of 

psychology, and his distinction between "primary memory" and "secondary memory". The first 
represents the ability to remember things that have just happened, while the second is the ability to 
remember things past. But the distinction between two memory systems, short-term memory and 
long-term memory began in the ’50s, with opposition between supporters of a unitary model and 
defenders of the hypothesis of a multiple and interactive system. Numerous neurological studies on 
patients affected with different forms of amnesia confirm the theory of distinct memory systems. In 
this regard Cardona cites LeDoux who presents the case of amnesic people who had undergone the 
removal of a part of the brain, and who showed a deficit in the long-term memory but not in the 
short-term, or vice versa. 
The characteristics of short-term memory are, according to Cardona the following: 
A. limited capacity and duration; 
B. essentially phonological coding; 
C. retention of information through repetition; 
D. interference-related forgetfulness. 
On the other hand, the place where our memories are permanently and permanently archived 
is long-term memory. It is generally divided into two main subsets: explicit declarative memory and 
implicit non-declarative memory. Cardona schematizes long-term memory in the following way: 
Declarative memory is very important for language. In particular, its semantic component is 
responsible for the meaning of words and concepts. It represents an abstract and general knowledge 
of the world and is not related to personal episodes. 
The characteristics of long-term memory are: 
A. unlimited capacity; 
В. mainly semantic decoding, partly visual and auditory ; 
C. maintenance of information through repetition and organization; 
D. can be no forgetfulness but loss of access to memories. 
After this brief presentation of the main characteristics of memory from the general point of 
view, we will further analyze working memory, which is part of short-term memory and plays a 
very important role in learning foreign languages. According to Daniel Gaonac'h, the working 
memory would be: 
A transient memory system responsible for maintaining and processing information for the 
purposes of a given task. The offending task is in our case the L2 learning, and the success of this 
one is supposed to depend in part on the efficiency of a working memory responsible for 
temporarily storing the information useful for the implementation of the learning. 
In addition, this type of memory requires the activation of selective attention to identify 
relevant information. According to Villarini and La Grassa the differences in age-related mnemonic 
abilities are due to a lower capacity of working memory. As with other changes in cognitive 
Long-term 
memory 
Declaratively 
semantic 
episodic 
Non-
Declarative 
procedural 
packaging 

abilities, it is not possible to establish either an age or a cause for these changes, but the authors 
imagine that there are three factors that need to be considered: 
- speed 
- strategies adopted 
- emotional and motivational factors 
In general, older people have a greater difficulty managing multiple information in a limited 
time, as we have already observed for attention processes. This is demonstrated in the case of tasks 
related to memorization, for which the effectiveness of responses increases where it is possible to 
choose the speed of the presentation of the subject to allow repetition and memorization of the 
elements to be learned. 

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