Now you see me: perception as a basic principle in foreign languages learning

We do not observe everything that we are able to see or hear everything that we believe to hear. We perceive, to a large extent, what we expect to happen and not what really happens, we make reconstructions and predictions constantly. This is how the brain works.In the case of the students whose mother tongue is similar to Spanish, it makes them capable of understanding the general sense of the text without even having a lot of practice with the Spanish itself. On the other hand, this process can be an impediment to discriminate differences that exist between the two languages. For example there are those who despite years of living in an environment of linguistic immersion, still present many phonetic and grammatical errors in their interlanguage. In this work, we shall try to demonstrate the importance of being aware of these cognitive issues with the objective of understand how they perceive our students.