The LEIDE group About us Our collaborators

The LEIDE Group

The LEIDE research group is made up of professors and researchers from the Universities of Alcalá, Salamanca, Alicante, País Vasco and Nebrija, the Instituto Cervantes and Alcalingua-UAH. It also has a large network of collaborators in many countries, all of them teachers of Spanish in different educational institutions.

The LEIDE group is coordinated by Professor Ana Blanco Canales (University of Alcalá).

Our interests

Learning processes

All members of the LEIDE group are interested in improving the teaching and learning processes of second languages. We know that, despite the progress made in recent decades, there is still a long way to go to achieve the objectives set by the Council of Europe of efficient mastery of two or more foreign languages.

To experience, to feel and to think

We believe that current approaches must take into account new contexts, factors and strategies, reflecting changing socio-cultural models. In this sense, we believe it is essential to start from humanistic assumptions, which focus on the learner as an individual who is part of an environment in which they experience, feel and think, and as a result of which they learn.

Language and brain

We must encourage sensory-rich learning processes that involve cognitive, affective and experiential learning. It is also essential to understand how the brain learns and how language functions in the learning brain.

Contributions from neurosciences

We are aware of the great breakthroughs in brain sciences and we want to benefit from their findings, contributions and achievements to better understand the processes of second language acquisition and, especially, to be able to generate theoretical frameworks to guide teaching, help teachers and improve results.

Applied Linguistics

In the near future, Applied Linguistics in Language Teaching should not only incorporate knowledge from neuroscience but should aspire to become a fundamental part of this interdisciplinary field of research.

“Passions about whose origin we deceived ourselves tyrannized most strongly over us. Our weakest motives were those of whose nature we were conscious”.

Oscar Wilde

“One just focuses a lot of emotions of a nasty kind on one person, and there you are, hating something or somebody”.

Patricia Highsmith

“Thoughts are the shadows of our feelings: always darker, emptier and simpler”.

Friedrich Nietzche

“Everyone governs everything according to their own affections”.

Spinoza

“Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm”.

Ralph W. Emerson

“I prefer where truth is important to write fiction”.

Virginia Wolf

“It is our attitude at the beginning of a difficult task which, more than anything else, will affect its successful outcome”.

William James

“Habits of thinking need not be forever. One of the most significant findings in psychology in the last twenty years is that individuals can choose the way they think”.

M. E. Seligman

“A pessimist sees the difficulty in every opportunity; an optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty”.

Winston S. Churchill

“Success requires persistence, the ability to not give up in the face of failure. I believe that optimistic explanatory style is the key to persistence”.

M.E. Seligman

“The limits of my language mean the limits of my world”.

Ludwig Wittgenstein

“Shift your attention, and your emotion shifts. Shift your emotion, and your attention shifts”.

Frederick Dodson

“Feelings or emotions are the universal language and are to be honored. They are the authentic expression of who you are at your deepest place”.

Judith Wright

“We often use strong language not to express a powerful emotion but to evoke it in us”.

Eric Hoffer

“You can't show me a sentence, word, or phoneme that is meaningless; by its nature, language is packed with meaning and emotion”.

Kenneth Goldsmith

“I am fascinated by language in daily life: the way it can evoke an emotion, a visual image, a complex idea, or a simple truth”.

Amy Tan

“Language is a mixture of statement and evocation”.

Elizabeth Bowen

“To have another language is to possess a second soul”.

Charlemagne

“To learn a language is to have one more window from which to look at the world”.

Chinese proverb

“He who knows no foreign languages know nothing of his own”.

J.W. von Goethe

“The most intimate temper of a people, its deepest soul, is above all in its language”.

Jules Michelet

“Language is the blood of the soul into which thoughts run and out of which they grow”.

Oliver Wendell Holmes

“Words are the most powerful thing in the universe... Words are containers. They contain faith, or fear, and they produce after their kind”.

Charles Capps

“My task which I am trying to achieve is by the power of the written word, to make you hear, to make you feel—it is, before all, to make you see. That—and no more, and it is everything”.

Joseph Conrad

“Words—so innocent and powerless as they are, as standing in a dictionary, how potent for good and evil they become, in the hands of one who knows how to combine them!”

Nathaniel Hawthorne

About us

All the members of the LEIDE group are united by our interest in the acquisition, learning and teaching of second languages, and more specifically, Spanish.

Within this field, our backgrounds are different, ranging from theoretical linguistics to cognitive psychology, sociolinguistics, psycholinguistics, psychopedagogy and didactics. Likewise, the aspects on which we have worked offer great diversity: phonic component, learning strategies, lexical availability, affectivity and motivation, communication skills and abilities.

Carmen RodríguezUniversidad de Tecnología de Jamaica
“In a dance classroom you repeatedly practice the choreography […]
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Álvaro Sesmilo PinaUniversidad de Alcalá
“In our Spanish as a foreign or additional language classes, […]
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María VaílloUniversidad Nebrija
“As a good psychologist, I am interested in people. […]
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Nuria CamuñasUniversidad Nebrija
“Emotion is innate in human beings and plays an […]
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Natividad Hernández MuñozUniversidad de Salamanca
“Multilingualism is the norm in the world. Bilingual minds […]
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Gabino BoqueteUniversidad de Alcalá
“Emotion is a fundamental element in the learning process: […]
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Juan Orellana
“Applied theatre produces a favourable context for developing a teaching-learning […]
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Marta Nogueroles LópezUniversidad Nebrija
“No one can learn a language without motivation, attitudes, […]
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María BrígidoUniversidad Nebrija
“Emotion moves the world, and learning is a process […]
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Mari Mar Boillos PereiraUniversidad del País Vasco/Euskal Herriko Unibertsitatea
“The concept of interlanguage brought about a change in […]
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Ana Blanco CanalesUniversidad de Alcalá
“Almost every word in our mother tongue carries an […]
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Alberto Rodríguez-LifanteUniversidad de Alicante
“What makes a human being “human”? It is probably […]
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Our collaborators

Our research work is possible thanks to the collaboration of institutions, researchers, teachers and students, who provide the necessary data and open their classrooms to experimentation. They are all aware of the importance of language learning in a globalised world in which effective and affective communication is the best guarantee for development, integration and coexistence. They are also aware that research into the processes of second language acquisition will make a decisive contribution to improving teaching (training curricula, methodological approaches, strategies, etc.).

These are the universities and language centres that support us.

These are the researchers and professors who collaborate in our research work.

We are willing to grow. The LEIDE Group is strongly interested in establish a broad and widespread network of partners to enable knowledge sharing, cooperation and transfer.