About this Program
1. Spirit of this program:
The most important motive that gave rise to this program is the amount of people in Canada who need to learn English at home via digital tools, and yet, they have not fulfilled their goal because most online options are inaccessible, discouraging, confusing, limited or ineffective. Thus, I set out to develop a web platform that is much more amicable than most extant choices. The core qualities that I aspire for this project to accomplish are those of being maximally accessible, engaging, intuitive, autonomous, flexible, and effective.
It is accessible insomuch as you don’t need to create an account or go through any tedious process to access the resources. All you need to do is open the website, and you get instant access to each and every learning material in order to start working without any further complications.
It is engaging as every activity is chosen to bear into account that most learners nowadays have a meager attention span; so, most individual activities take only from 1 to 5 minutes to finish, and they are as interactive as possible to keep you absorbed.
It is intuitive forasmuch as the interface design is minimalistic. We have avoided flocking the site with endless buttons that render the learning experience a confusing one (which so sadly often happens in other platforms).
It is autonomous insofar as a motivated learner could very well navigate the website and solve every activity without necessarily having a teacher nearby.
It is flexible to the extent that you can pick any level any time: These are arranged in a way that you depart from a rich lexical basis that moves progressively to increasingly more abstract syntactic contents; yet, you can start at any module of your choice without necessarily having traversed all the other modules.
And it is effective inasmuch as learning is proven to take place.
2. The name of this program
The name "English Cortex" refers to the fact that language resides, revolves, and evolves in the brain. This program takes everything we know from cognitive neurolinguistics theory and applies it to language learning: Distributed networks of representation, long-term neural potentiation, neural semantic networks, complex domain matrices, mirror neurons, spreading activation, neural pathways, neural coactivation, abductive reasoning, cognitive states, mental spaces, conceptual prototypes, plasticity, experientialism, multimodality, perspectivization, symbolization, iconicity, indexicality, embodied, embedded, enactive, extended, and shared cognition, episodic and working memory, semantic and procedural memory, spatial memory and navigation, cognitive maps, and so forth.
Our brains contain about 86,000,000,000 (eighty-six billion) neurons; each neuron is connected from 1,000 to 10,000 other neurons; this wiring results in about 100,000,000,000,000 (one hundred trillion) connections. Language is one of its most complex and interconnected tasks, and experientialism is the best possible way to reprogram these circuits; hence, this program aims at wiring and rewiring both old and new neural networks so that you can speak, listen, read, and write in English as a second language in Canada.
It is my hope that this site accomplishes its mission, and we can all move forward as competent users of the English language in Canada.
English Cortex
Multimodal Experientialism
