Web Activity 3

As I read about Baddeley's Model of Working Memory and Information Processing Theory, I thought about my experiences teaching EFL (English as a Foreign Language) in S. Korea. I taught in a public high school for a year; my conversation class supplemented the usual English classes taught by Korean teachers that were heavy on grammar and reading. Often, I would see my students carrying huge vocabulary lists, desperately trying to memorize dozens of English words and their definitions organized alphabetically. It was an exercise in futility and didn't take into account any learning theory or method to ensure retention of information. A few things that could have helped my students, based on Braddeley and IPT:

1. Chunking the information into smaller, more manageable parts. Instead of tying to memorize whole lists, break it down into groups of 3 or 5 words.

2. Not memorizing in alphabetical order, but by topic. When possible, link a word to a picture of it (visual spatial). Use the word in context.

3. When engaging in conversation, there's a lot going on at once. Non verbals, accents, sentence structure, background noise, etc... When communicating in a second language you have do balance these things all at once. You will never be asked to list 15 words starting with "Ar-As" in a free flowing conversation.

4. Finding ways to move words from short term to long term storage. Sometimes, students could speak fluently on a certain topic, but not be able to say anything about another topic - they did not have the words stored to be able to use them. One week I could speak with someone on a certain topic, later on in the semester, whoops! The info wasn't there anymore.

There may be other ways these theories interact but these are the main things I could think of. Decreasing intrinsic load and finding ways to engage multiple senses to increase retention was always a main goal when teaching my EFL students.