Memory: What Every Language Teacher Should Know

The purpose of school – indeed, the purpose of all learning – is to change long-term memory. The problem is that much of what we do in school takes little account of what we know about how memory works (Dylan Wiliam). 

Gianfranco Conti and I are pleased to let you know that our new book on memory called Memory: What Every Language Teacher Should Know is now available from Amazon. It will later be available via alternative sources. As with our previous books, The Language Teacher Toolkit and Breaking the Sound Barrier: Teaching Language Learners How to Listen, this book is independently published and costs £22. An e-book is in the works and should appear in around two weeks.

The book has been well over a year in preparation and final editing was done by my wife Professor Elspeth Jones, who also edited our previous books. Elspeth edits her own series of books in the field of Internationalisation of Higher Education.

Why did we decide to write this book?

Well, I think it was Gianfranco who originally suggested that we should do something on cognitive science for language teachers. In recent years, the so-called science of learning has been in vogue in the UK and various teacher books have been written on the subject, but none aimed specifically at language teachers. Gianfranco has been blogging about concepts such as working memory and cognitive load since 2015 and, although we make reference to cognitive science in our other books, we never went into it it in a lot of detail.

At first we thought of doing a very short, easy introduction, covering memory and skill acquisition, but as I progressed with the text, it became apparent that we couldn't do justice to the subject in a simplistic way and that we had too much subject matter for one digestible book. We therefore decided to write two books, one focused largely on memory, the other on the acquisition of skills and fluency building. I am the lead writer on the first, Gianfranco on the second.

Essentially, we think that for language teachers to get the best out of their students it's worth knowing a good deal about how learning and memory work. (It's actually hard to separate out the terms learning and memory - by one popular definition, "learning is a change in long-term memory".) So in the book, we cover a range of topics, with each chapter supported by references to research, some old and some right up to date. 

Whereas in our other books the research evidence has been largely from the field of second language acquisition (SLA), in this volume we have cited a lot of evidence from cognitive pyschology, including a good deal from some "big guns" in the field such as Alan Baddeley, John Sweller, Norman Cowan, Stanislas Dehaene (neurolinguistics), Nick Ellis (psycholinguistics), Robert Bjork and Henry Roediger. 

In addition, we have referenced research by well known second language acquisition writers such as Paul Nation, Rod Ellis, Michael Long, Stephen Krashen, Robert DeKeyser and Richard Schmidt.

One interesting phenomenon in recent years has been the convergence of cognitive science and second language acquisition research, which had for many years, been independent of each other. Now, a growing number of scholars are happy to take on board general theories of learning and apply them to language learning. Now, we stress from the start of the book, that language learning (including second language learning), is distinct from other types of learning in important ways, but that we cannot ignore the findings of cognitive psychology.

So, that said, what do we talk about in the book?

The book runs to around 260 pages and the chapter titles are:

1. What is memory?
2. The multi-component model of memory
3. Working memory
4. Phonological memory
5. Visuospatial memory
6. Cognitive Load Theory
7. Managing cognitive load in the classroom
8. Long-term memory
9. Making it stick
10. Declarative and procedural memory
11. Remembering vocabulary
12. Prospective memory and metamemory
13. Learnability
14. Learning from mistakes
15. The emotional factors affecting memory
16. A memory-friendly curriculum

Each chapter is a mixture of description, research references, applications to language teaching classrooms, interesting "did you know? facts about memory and learning, and specific lesson activities which support the ideas presented. Each chapter ends with a brief summary of the key points, some questions for reflection and ideas for further reading and viewing online. The book is a lighter on specific teaching activities than our previous books, but our aim was to provide something interesting, informative and useful. If you are familiar with our work you will find references to some areas and lesson ideas we have described in the past. 

A particular challenge of this book was to try to get the balance right between detail and concision, since some of the material is not particularly easy if you have no background in psychology or second language acquisition. We have probably leaned more towards detail. If you read the book, you'll be the judge of whether we got that right!

We would like to share what we have learned ourselves with the goal of helping teachers understand their craft better. In this way, teachers can align their practices (curriculum planning, lesson planning, classroom procedures and techniques) to what we know about how students learn.

We learned a lot during the process of researching the book and we are happy to share what we know. We hope the book will be read by trainees and experienced teachers alike and that it will be picked up by training institutions.