EL GAZETTE Online, December 2009 (Issue 359: p. 15)

Magic of mnemonics
Julia Robinson wonders if memory tricks work in learning a foreign language

Several books promise miracle ways to improve your memory, but can these methods be applied to learning a foreign language – and do they actually work? Children’s author Karen Dolby thinks so – her new book Mrs Dolby’s Memory Magic (published by Preface Publishing) includes chapters on language, literature and ‘How to learn a foreign language’.

Memory tricks certainly have uses for those learning a second language – particularly for acquiring vocabulary. Dolby covers the commonly used mnemonic techniques such as rhymes, chanting, word play, visualisation, links and pegs. ‘In my experience, anything that breaks information into manageable chunks is a helpful aid,’ she says. For learning a language she also suggests the section on how actors learn lines: ‘Speaking aloud, acting out the words and imagining explaining them to someone else could be particularly helpful.’

A more complex mnemonic technique is the idea of a memory journey, where to be remembered items are linked visually to a well-known journey such as your route to work, or rooms in your house. This could easily be adapted for memorising a presentation or an essay plan.

One of the major challenges for those beginning to speak a foreign language is developing a basic functional vocabulary. Dolby’s book includes the ten most common words in English, as well as a list of 100 words that supposedly give you the fundamentals to communicate in French, Spanish, German and – presumably – English.

‘You would have a challenging time doing much with a vocabulary consisting of these words,’ says Paul Meara from Swansea University. But there have been other attempts to distil languages into a minimum vocabulary – intended as a useful goal for those beginning to learn a foreign language rather than an end in itself. Meara recommends Paul Nation’s ‘Little Language’, a list of about 1,000 words available in a number of languages and ‘Ogden’s Basic English’, a 600-word list popular in the 1930s. An interesting academic article by Beatriz Dorriots, ‘How to succeed with only 50 words: an analysis of role-play in the frame of adult language acquisition’, analyses a role-play task in which a Spanish-speaking learner of Swedish attempts to get a refund for faulty goods. Dorriots shows how the limited vocabulary is supplemented by other factors in order to achieve a satisfactory outcome.

en applied to vocabulary learning in the keyword method. Keywords pair the L2 (the learner’s second language) word to be learned with a similar-sounding L1 (learner’s first language) word. Since the Dutch word kreeft (lobster) sounds like the English word ‘craft’, craft becomes the keyword for an English-speaking learner of Dutch. The link is then strengthened by visualising an image such as a lobster balancing precariously on a small boat (craft). There is a lot of research that shows that this method of vocabulary learning is really effective both with adults and young learners, although since very young children may have   difficulty generating visual images it can be helpful to provide them with the interactive image, rather then letting them create their own.

Paul Nation, professor in applied linguistics at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand agrees. ‘The use of mnemonic devices is an important part of deliberate vocabulary learning. Besides the keyword technique, the use of word parts such as prefixes, suffixes and stems can also have a very useful mnemonic function. The beauty of these is that the mnemonic help is also largely etymologically real. Thus when learning the word “rank”, being told that the already known word ‘arrange’ has the same stem and much of the same meaning makes the job much easier.’ He also suggests that learners’ dictionaries could include this kind of information.

Interestingly, deliberate vocabulary learning – including rote learning – seems to be far superior to learning from context. Dozens of studies comparing the   two show direct learning to come out top for speed of learning, retention and the amount of words learned. Very recent research shows deliberate vocabulary learning leads not only to explicit knowledge of the words, but also to the implicit (subconscious) knowledge which is needed for normal language use. ‘This is different from the deliberate learning of grammar, which does not seem to result in implicit knowledge,’ explains Nation.

The mnemonics in Dolby’s book are interspersed with short articles on the psychology of memory and how and why the different methods work, which gives the lie to the idea that there is anything magic about them. ‘There are no real quick fixes,’ says Dolby.

The extended cognitive processing one performs when using ‘memory tricks’ is what helps one remember. Different people learn and retain information in different ways. The real magic is finding what works for you.

EL GAZETTE Online, December 2009 (Issue 359: p. 15) Magic of mnemonics by Julia Robinson