What is priming?

This short blog is an adapted extract from Memory: What Every Language Teacher Should Know (Smith and Conti, 2021).

Priming is an important concept to be aware of as a language teacher. In terms of general learning, priming is about the kind of unconscious 'triggers' which get you to remember or act in a particular way. For instance, you might happen to see a Facebook ad for a product, then the following day end up buying the same product without even remembering that you had seen the advert. You were primed to carry out an action. Or else you might find yourself using an expression a friend has used, without being aware that you had paid attention to it.

In more detail, there are said to be two main types of priming which have powerful learning effects:

• Perceptual priming. When you see or hear something a second time you process it faster.
• Conceptual priming. The same as perceptual priming, except that the two things need to be related by meaning.

You can immediately see how repetition and association of concepts play a role in faster processing of language.

In second language learning the priming has also been described as semantic (lexical), phonological and syntactic.

1. Semantic or lexical priming. This is when a listener, hearing the word bread will recognise words like baker, butter, knife more quickly than unrelated words like chair, cement or lightbulb. For example, if you present the word transport a second time, a student processes it faster. Subsequently, if you present the word train it is processed more quickly because it is related to the topic of transport. Priming is known to activate the brain areas associated with the thing being primed. So, priming the word transport causes all the areas of the brain associated with transport to become active for a moment. This extra bit of activity makes it easier for additional information to activate them fully. In this way students develop what is called perceptual fluency.

Lexical Priming Theory states that each time we encounter a word we make a subconscious note of the words which could occur alongside it (collocations) and of any associated grammatical pattern. Through multiple encounters with that word we become primed to associate it with the most commonly recurring elements. (Think of how, when you enter a word in Google other words immediately appear after it, based on frequency of search or your own previous searches.) This suggests teachers should consider mainly teach vocabulary in chunks and sentences to encourage the lexical priming effect to operate. In this way, retrieving chunks from memory becomes more fluent and effortless.

2. Phonological priming. When word primes another which sounds similar, such as rhyming words. Light primes night and bite. Any teaching which encourages students to notice phonological and similarities should help students remember words and phrases. Rhymes are a good example.

3.           3. Syntactic priming. This is when speakers use the same grammatical structures they have recently heard or read. Short term syntactic priming is thought to involve explicit memory (consciously re-using an expression just heard), whereas long-term syntactic priming is thought to be the result of implicit learning (unconscious learning).

What does this imply in practice? Carefully controlling the language input is likely to lead to students using structures more successfully. It is wise, therefore, to use frequently occurring grammatical patterns in the expectation that students will pick them up both in the short and long term. This can be done, for example, by means of question-answer sequences, sentence builders (also known as substitution tables), various oral drills, as well as by flooding input language with the patterns you want students to pick up. Sets of short paragraphs, each one containing examples of the same grammatical structure, worked on intensively with a range of exercises, can supply the input and interaction needed to encourage priming. This is known as narrow reading (Smith and Conti, 2016), based loosely on an idea from Stephen Krashen.

Reference: Memory: What Every Language Teacher Should Know (Smith and Conti, 2021). Independently published.