I have often thought that one thing which holds back successful language acquisition is the nature of modern school timetables. One hour lessons are the common practice in schools these days, with two or three contacts with the teacher in a modern language per week. At my own school we still work on the basis of four or five contacts of 40 minutes per week and I believe our students benefit from it. I had never come across any specific evidence for this, even though it seems pretty much like common sense.
I wonder to what extent this was considered when the government designed the 1 hour three part lesson?
Anyway, someone posted a link to an article called The Psychology of Foreign Language Vocabulary Acquisition, by psychologist Nick Ellis from the University of Bangor written in 1995. Here is the relevant passage:
The spacing effect is one of the most robust phenomena in experimental psychology: for a given amount of study time, spaced presentations yield substantially better learning than do massed presentations. It is better to distribute practice. In many cases two spaced presentations are about twice as effective as two massed presentations, and the difference between them increases as the frequency of repetition increases (Melton, 1970; Underwood, 1970). This effect was apparent in of the earliest of experimental studies of learning and memory performed by Ebbinghaus (1885) who concluded that “with any considerable number of repetitions a suitable distribution of them over a space of time is decidedly more advantageous than the massing of them at a single time”. It was soon being passed on to educators; for example, William James (1901) advised teachers and students that it is better to repeat an association on many different days than again and again on just a few days. Yet despite the power of this effect, it is rarely realised by implementation in educational programmes, whether text- or CAL-based (Dempster, 1988).
Ellis was researching vocabulary retention, but I believe that the same would hold for the acquisition of syntax. To my mind, the best school timetable would allow enough flexibility for some subjects, such as art and science, to have longer sessions, but to allow others, such as maths and languages, to have shorter ones.
I wonder to what extent this was considered when the government designed the 1 hour three part lesson?
Anyway, someone posted a link to an article called The Psychology of Foreign Language Vocabulary Acquisition, by psychologist Nick Ellis from the University of Bangor written in 1995. Here is the relevant passage:
The spacing effect is one of the most robust phenomena in experimental psychology: for a given amount of study time, spaced presentations yield substantially better learning than do massed presentations. It is better to distribute practice. In many cases two spaced presentations are about twice as effective as two massed presentations, and the difference between them increases as the frequency of repetition increases (Melton, 1970; Underwood, 1970). This effect was apparent in of the earliest of experimental studies of learning and memory performed by Ebbinghaus (1885) who concluded that “with any considerable number of repetitions a suitable distribution of them over a space of time is decidedly more advantageous than the massing of them at a single time”. It was soon being passed on to educators; for example, William James (1901) advised teachers and students that it is better to repeat an association on many different days than again and again on just a few days. Yet despite the power of this effect, it is rarely realised by implementation in educational programmes, whether text- or CAL-based (Dempster, 1988).
Ellis was researching vocabulary retention, but I believe that the same would hold for the acquisition of syntax. To my mind, the best school timetable would allow enough flexibility for some subjects, such as art and science, to have longer sessions, but to allow others, such as maths and languages, to have shorter ones.
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