Donde fueres haz lo que vieres. Aportaciones de la neurociencia al desarrollo de la competencia intercultural. Un nuevo horizonte en la enseñanza del ELE: el Serious Game

The current trend in teaching foreign languages is to conceive the development of pragmatic competence as an essential and inseparable part of communicative competence. Today, progress of Cognitive Neuroscience enables one to consider social behavior in neuroanatomical terms: knowing how the brain integrates complex concepts of pragmatic competence proves highly effective in developing methodologies used in the language classroom to address these issues. The use of games and learning by doing in virtual worlds may be regarded as a very interesting option in order to acquire this competence. In this contribution, we have aimed at combining theoretical principles of Neuroscience and didactics to offer, in the specific case of Teaching Spanish as a Foreign Language (TSFL), a relatively new type of teaching material: the Serious Game, as well as to present the results of a first qualitative study of the use of this type of material in the field of language acquisition.