How can we remember words?

HOW CAN WE REMEMBER WORDS?

In the first and in the second language, learners not only need learning words and learning new meanings of old words. They also need to remember them. How does memory work? What is the best way to acquire these words?

The memory can be divided in different systems. Researchers distinguish between the following:

• The short-term store (STS): It is a kind of memory that keeps the information for little periods of time, few seconds. Vocabulary learning involve more than that. For this reason, this memory is not useful to acquire vocabulary.
• Working memory: It is a kind of memory where the information is placed, studied and moved. It can come from external sources or it can be downloaded from the long-term memory; or both of them. Words are remained for about twenty seconds.
• Long-term memory: It is a type of memory which has an enormous capacity of retention and durability. However this memory is not able to remain all the words that we learn.

In order to remain the words in the long-term memory, I have chosen some resources that can help us to not forget the concepts that we learn.

• Spacing: The principle of distributed practice. It is better to teach the words in sets of two or three words. After that you go back and assess these, then you teach some more and assess all together and so on. In the next lesson the vocabulary will be reviewed.
• Use: The best way to learn the vocabulary and add it in long-term memory is using the words in some interesting situation like games or role plays, for example.
• Mnemonics: These are little tricks that we use to remain words in a visual way. The most common can be the keyword technique; it is to catch the first letter of each word in a sentence.
• Motivation: The strong motivation makes the learner to spend more time using and remembering better the words.
• Imaging: Tests have shown that visualised words are more memorable than words which do not evoke a picture. It could help if learners associate them with some mental images.

To sum up, it is important to know different resources to acquire vocabulary and it is essential to forget the traditional methods in which the students only develop the short-term store because they are not able to remind the vocabulary in the long-term memory.

In my opinion here there are some resources to acquire vocabulary but there are a lot of them that we can use with the student in class.

Bibliography

Thornbury, S. (2002). How to teach vocabulary. Edinburgh Gate: Pearson.