I have been much quieter on the blog of late. During the lockdown period I was working on two projects: the set of CPD screencasts I recorded for my new YouTube channel and my book 50 Lesson Plans for French Teachers: Step by Step. I may add more screencasts in due course, but the book is now published and selling well, I am pleased to say.
I have recently returned to a project I had begun with Gianfranco Conti a few months ago, namely a book about cognitive science for language teachers. To keep the text to a manageable size we decided to keep the focus of this book on memory rather than to carry out our original plan of a two part book on memory and skill acquisition. I am leading the writing on this while Gianfranco intends to be lead writer on the second book focused on skill acquisition.
The way we work is to have a broad, planned structure to the book with clear objectives. In practice, this structure alters as we research the topic. In this instance, the brief is to write something useful and clear about the science of memory, specifically for language teachers. While there have been a number of edu-books on the science of learning, there has been nothing very much for language teachers in particular. So our aim has been to produce a succinct summary of the findings of cognitive psychology on memory, then relate these to language teacher classroom practice. So, as with our previous books, the goal is to link research to practice, from a teacher’s point of view.
So the book is taking shape and will likely end up with around 20 short chapters on the topic of memory. Some of these chapters include implications of the research for classroom practice. I hope the book will not exceed about 130 pages. Unlike our previous books, references to specific classroom tasks will be limited, so the guidance we modestly provide will be of a more general nature and relate to issues concerning such aspects as working memory, long-term memory, cognitive load, explicit versus implicit learning, declarative and procedural knowledge, learnability, emotional factors in memory building, spacing, retrieval, testing and more.
Apologies if any of that already sounds technical! You can be assured that we will make our explanations as clear as we can. We are also including tidbits of information about memory which are just plain interesting and maybe surprising. One challenge for us is to get the right balance of research detail and practical guidance. Another challenge is the amount of reading it has taken over time to ensure that what we write is well-informed and accurate. Needless to say, we find this subject fascinating and hope to share some of that interest with you.
Ultimately, any book like this needs to be useful and informative, and to make teachers think critically about their practice. So we shall do our best to make this the case.
With a following wind I hope we can see the book published sometime before the end of the year. Hopefully we shall have a title by then too!
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