890-521 English in the Global Context and Second Language Acquisition

Lecturer: Assoc. Prof. Adisa Teo, Ph.D.

Facts/Findings about Memory

1.

More than 99% of the sensory information reaching the brain is quickly
forgotten. The small fraction selected for retention is not passively recorded, but
is grasped as an active process by the living organism because of its apparent
relevance to the basic drives for possible use at some future date. (p. 7)

2.

Timing
Not all kinds of input are consolidated at the same rate...The memory traces for
what is unfamiliar and only partially understood need a longer time without
disruption from new inputs. (p. 111)

3.

Spacing
In studies that contrasted massed practice (numerous consecutive exposures to
an item) with distributed practice (the same number of exposures interspersed
among other items), distributed practice consistently proved to give superior
resultsIn addition to better recall, subjects also perceived the distributed items
to have occurred more frequently than the massed items. Furthermore, the
distributed practice effect appeared to persist over much longer time lags than the
benefits from massed practice do. (p. 112)

4.

Pacing
In one study, subjects were presented with sequences of 12 letters, one letter at a
time. Memory was considerably better when the subjects were allowed to move
from one letter to the next at their own pace, compared to seeing the same
material presented in the same total amount of time but at a constant rhythm.
Perhaps the lesson to be drawn from this experiment is that because our students
minds all work a little differently, consolidation times cannot be predicted
exactly. And because students are able to recognize and to some extent control
their own mental processes, they can profit from freedom to do so. (p. 113)

5.

Dual coding
If people have two codes for information (verbal plus visual) rather than one,
retention should be enhanced. (p. 49)

6.

Affective coding
What is important and emotionally charged tends to be more rapidly
embedded than that which is emotionally neutral or unimportant. (p. 111)
People learn best from utterances in which they have a strong personal stake
or investment. (p. 135)
Affective information has an effect on all stages of storage and retrieval. It is
itself also one kind of information that is stored and retrieved along with
other kinds. Teachers should not allow preoccupation with language or
teaching procedures to crowd affect out of their planning or monitoring of
student activities. (p. 103)

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7.

Effects of activity
Bower and Winzens had subjects study pairs of unrelated concrete nouns, at the
rate of 5 seconds per item. One group of subjects rehearsed each pair silently. A
second group read aloud a sentence that contained the nouns. A third group made
up their own sentences and said them aloud. A fourth group visualized a mental
picture in which the referents of the two nouns were in some kind of vivid
interaction with each other, but said nothing aloud. The second group performed
better than the first, the third better than the second, and the fourth best of all.
These investigators concluded that the students memory benefits from actively
searching out, discovering and depicting, as contrasted with rote repetition,
sentence reading, or even generation of their own relatively unimaginative
sentences. (p. 115)

8.

Depth of processing
Mental activity on the part of the subject, whether intentional or
unintentional, has a powerful effect on memory. (p. 129)
We could think of a series of usual classroom activities that lie at
successively deeper levels: retelling a story, verbatim or in ones own
words; improvising variations on a memorized dialog; writing an
autographical statement based on a model. (p. 131)
It is easy enough to devise some kind of communication scale whereon the
rote repetition of meaningless material is at the zero point; the giving of
meaningful but prescribed responses to stimuli from teacher, tape, or
textbooks is slightly more communicative; the selection of a situationally
appropriate response from among a set of previously practiced responses is
still more communicative and conversing freely about matters of real and
urgent interest is most communicative of all. (p. 136-137)
In one experiment, subjects were given a list of letter sequences. About
each word they were asked one question, but not all the questions were alike.
There were, in fact, five different questions: (1) Is this a word? (2) Is it
printed in capitals, or in lower-case letters? (3) Does it rhyme with____?
(4) Is it a member of the____category? (5) Does it fit into the following
sentence? Each question was assumed to require subjects to process the
word to a greater cognitive depth than the question that precedes it in the
list. Craik defined cognitive depth in terms of the meaningfulness
extracted from the stimulus. In this experiment, deeper decisions required
some additional time but they also led to dramatically better performance
both on a recognition task and on a recall task. (p. 116)

Source: Stevick, E. W. (1996). Memory, meaning & method: A view of language

teaching (2nd ed.). New York: Heinle & Heinle.