Arranged By:

Ø Andi Andriyadi Hasan

English Literature Department

Ag II

Adab & Humaniora Faculty

State Islamic University (UIN) Alauddin

Makassar, Sul-Sel

2010

Memory

There are many reasons why teachers of all subjects are interested in memory and forgetting. Pupils sometimes seem to need large amounts of practice on some point before it will be remembered, at other times a single mention is sufficient. Some pupils appear to need constant reminders about some piece of necessary information, others learn it seemingly without effort. There are wide differences, then, between the memory demands of different tasks and between individuals’ memory abilities. For the language teacher there are also different goals, concerning long-term and short-term objectives.

Structure and organisation

In this section we will investigate some of the distinctions drawn by psychologists in the attempt to specify the limitations and nature of memory processes and relate them to various aspects of language and language learning. The distinctions that have been found necessary fall into three basic categories: time, process and type of information. Much of the discussion will recall the arguments presented in Chapters 2 and 3 about behaviouristic or associationist approaches to learning and information-processing ones.

Distinctions by time

Frequently, we are able to recall information for immediate use that we cannot recall after some delay in time. For example, if we look up a telephone number we did not previously know it is not difficult to retain it for immediate dialling, but if we have to dial again after a few moments it is often necessary to consult the directory again. It is also possible to learn a telephone number by heart and this requires extra work of various kinds.

Distinctions by process

Chunking        It has been known since the last century that the capacity of immediate memory is limited, but it is only comparatively recently that the significance of that limited capacity has been recognised. G. A. Miller (1956) showed that the limitation was approximately seven items, however complex those items were and from whatever number of possible similar items they were chosen. That is to say, the limitation was in terms of perceptible chunk of information, rather than on the information itself.

Working memory      Most of the work of on short term memory dsicussed so far involved people recalling lists or arrays of independent items.

Frequency      Long term memory was first studied on a large experimental scale by Ebbinhaus, who, in his Uber das Gedachtnis reported a long series of experiments on his own learning of lists of deliberately meaningless items.

Associative Clusters             Just make a group of words, that we can remember or recall easy.

Codes              Three stages can conveniently be distinguished: intake, storage, and retrieval. Making a code about the words or prhase is better.

Schemas        So far, mention has been made only of relatively superficial types and effects of subjective organisation.

Distinctions by type of material

Up till now we have spoken as if all the material we retains is of the same kind, and as if therefore our representation of it is, in principle, similar. However, an important distinction was drawn by Tulving (1972) between episodic and semantic memory. Essentially, episodic memory refers to stored information that is coded by chronology: (auto)biographical details, sequences of events, what X said when he was drinking his coffee, the list of appointments for the day, and so on.

Some Pedagogical Problems

In conclusion, we shall see how this rather complex picture of memory for language informs some specific language teaching problems.

Learning by rote

This has been a favourite technique in some quarters for years. There is no doubt that in the early stages of learning a foreign language, the ability to perform a rote-learned chunk in the foreign language has some motivational advantage; it gives a sense of achievement not necessarily dimmed by the perception that not all the internal relationships in the material are fully understood.

Strategies for learning and retrieval

Another implication which seems to be clear from the above picture is that the teacher’s task is not so much to arrange for repetition or recycling of L vocabulary, phrases, or structural patterns, but to help the student discover strategies for organising his or her own knowledge, whether into semantic or associative clusters as in the Bousfield experiments, o ‘meaning hierarchies’.

The role of comprehension questions

It is a truism to point out that the technique of asking questions after a reading of a listening task is a testing technique and not a teaching technique. Students are assumed to comprehend and learn by unahalysed processes and the teacher checks that they have done the work. As a testing technique, however, there are many problems concerning the form of the questions, the role of errors originating from the production of the answer the difficulty of the language of the questions.

Summary

In this chapter we have looked at various subdivisions of the concept of memory and related them to various problems in the teaching of languages. In general, an organizational, constructive view of memory has been preferred over a view based on frequency and repetition, and implications from such a view for language teaching and testing have been considered.