How Short-Term Memory Shapes Language Learning Success
The difference between mastering a new language or getting lost in translation.
Imagine you had only 10–15 seconds to make a memory last. That's the window of opportunity your working memory has to capture and process new information before it vanishes. In the world of language learning, these precious seconds are the battlefield where words are either consigned to oblivion or promoted to long-term memory. How we manage this fleeting interval can make the difference between mastering a new language or getting lost in translation.
Just like all good teaching practice, this week will be building on our previous post on chunking – if you haven’t read that yet, you should!
Working memory is, simply put, the short-term memory that absorbs information and decides to either place it into long term memory, or forget it. This memory lasts 10–15 seconds, and is pivotal in allowing students to take in input from a second language.
So how do we maximise our working memory when learning a language?
Smith and Conti give us an excellent example of how we use short term memory in our everyday lives. Phone numbers – long strings of random and unlinked digits – are too complicated for us to remember the first time. So, what do we do? We repeat them in our heads until we’ve been able to write them down. In fact, we already know how to stretch our memory, we do this through chunking the digits together into more memorable multi-digit units. (Smith and Conti, 2023)
“By organizing the stimulus input simultaneously into several dimensions and successively into a sequence of chunks, we manage to break (or at least stretch) this informational bottleneck.” (Miller, 1994)
For more information on chunking, check out our previous post!
But how does working memory play a role in classrooms?
Listening is the primary input that students can gain from, yet if it is done wrong, working memory will be overworked and nothing will be absorbed. In fact, for incidental learning to take place (learning with no specific focus on the word) students need to understand 95-98% of the content (Nation, I.S.P., 2022)
Therefore, the more vocab that is known already, the better the learning will be when exposed to novel words (Archibald, 2013b). This is supported by another study by (Snowling, Chiat and Hulme, 1991) which states that “children with good vocabulary knowledge are better able to cope with the processing demands of non-word repetition tasks than children with poor vocabulary knowledge”. This study highlights that when students come across novel words, those who have a stronger previous knowledge are more likely to process the word than students without the same amount of prior knowledge.
From this, we can gain an understanding of the importance of making sure that the listening tasks students are given are at the same level as their understanding, as their working memory can only handle a small percentage of unknown words whilst maintaining an understanding of what is being said.
This can be reflected to cognitive load too. Cognitive load is the load placed on working memory, and is easy to overstimulate in a classroom. If a listening task is interrupted by a flashy PowerPoint or an over-enthusiastic teacher, the cognitive load is strained and cannot optimally absorb and learn from the listening task (Smith and Conti, 2023).
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Theory into action:
As we’ve discussed, working memory gives us a very small window of opportunity to learn – so use it wisely. When providing a listening task for students, make sure they can concentrate fully on the task (easier said than done) by reducing other inputs in the classroom.
On top of this, too easy is better than too hard. Remember the 95-98% rule, if a student doesn’t understand the majority of the audio, the chances of incidental learning plummet.
How else do you maximise the working memory window? We’d love to know!
Reference list
Archibald, L.M.D. (2013a). Issue Editor Foreword. Topics in Language Disorders, 33(3), pp.187–189. doi:https://doi.org/10.1097/tld.0b013e3182a1bc01.
Archibald, L.M.D. (2013b). The Language, Working Memory, and Other Cognitive Demands of Verbal Tasks. Topics in Language Disorders, [online] 33(3), pp.190–207. doi:https://doi.org/10.1097/tld.0b013e31829dd8af.
Baddeley, A.D., Hitch, G.J. and Allen, R.J. (2009). Working memory and binding in sentence recall. Journal of Memory and Language, [online] 61(3), pp.438–456. doi:https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jml.2009.05.004.
Brener, R. (1940). An experimental investigation of memory span. Journal of Experimental Psychology, [online] 26(5), pp.467–482. doi:https://doi.org/10.1037/h0061096.
Miller, G.A. (1994). The magical number seven, plus or minus two: Some limits on our capacity for processing information. Psychological Review, 101(2), pp.343–352. doi:https://doi.org/10.1037//0033-295x.101.2.343.
Nation, I.S.P. (2022). Learning Vocabulary in Another Language. 3rd ed. Learning Vocabulary in Another Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
Smith, S. and Conti, G. (2023). The Language Teacher Toolkit. 2nd ed. Independently Published.
Snowling, M., Chiat, S. and Hulme, C. (1991). Words, nonwords, and phonological processes: Some comments on Gathercole, Willis, Emslie, and Baddeley. Applied Psycholinguistics, 12(3), pp.369–373. doi:https://doi.org/10.1017/s0142716400009279.