Forgetting

This is another in my series of short blog posts based on sections of our forthcoming second edition of The Language Teacher Toolkit (Smith and Conti, 2023). One area we have developed further in this heavily revised book is how knowledge of cognitive science and memory can be helpful when thinking about the language learning experience in the classroom. This section is about forgetting.

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A first point to make is that we tend to forget things very quickly in general. Think for a moment about how quickly we forget someone’s name at a party, or how we must rehearse in our head or out loud a phone number we have been given. German psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus investigated forgetting and produced his famous forgetting curve. In 1885 he did experiments with short nonsense words of three letters, then tried to remember them at various time intervals after the initial learning. The results of his experiments were clear and have been replicated many times since.

The reason we often fail to retrieve a word is not necessarily that the word has disappeared from memory. It may be that the context in which the word was learned has not been replicated.  For example: if a student learns a word highlighted in red the whiteboard while sitting near a specific classmate, the colour red, the teacher’s whiteboard and the classmate are all possible retrieval cues for that word. The absence of these three factors may prevent recall. This implies that the more associations created by the student in learning a word, the more likely they are to remember it. The phenomenon of recall being associated with the context in which an item was learned is called Transfer-Appropriate Processing. It means that if we test an item of vocabulary in the same way that the item was first learned, it is easier to recall.

Another possible reason we forget is that when we take in new information, a certain amount of time is necessary for changes to the nervous system to take place so that it is properly recorded. If this consolidation process is not completed, we lose the information. Consolidation has even been shown to occur during sleep. Without rehearsal of L2 vocabulary, 60% of it is thought to be forgotten within 48 hours of having ‘learned’ it. This is why we need to recycle the information repeatedly until the information is stored permanently in long-term memory.

Forgetting is also ‘modality specific’. This means we might forget one dimension of a word rather than others. For instance, we may not recall the pronunciation of a word, but may recall its spelling. We may recall its meaning, but not its collocations (the other words it tends to keep company with).

Finally, words can be forgotten because of what cognitive psychologist call interference. This is when two words have similar meanings or sound similar. So, in French, a student may forget the meaning of the words fraise (strawberry) and framboise (raspberry), since, in this case they are both red berry fruits and both begin with /fr/. Interference can be proactive or retroactive. Proactive interference is where knowledge we already have interferes with how we learn new information. Retroactive interference is where new information disrupts our existing knowledge.

An example of proactive interference would be where students have learned a set of German verbs in the perfect tense, which are all conjugated with the auxiliary verb haben (‘to have’), as in Ich habe gelernt – ‘I have learned’), then they are taught that some verbs take the auxiliary sein (‘to be’ as in Ich bin gegangen – ‘I have gone/been’). As a result they may forget that to use the auxiliary sein with verbs that require it.

In contrast, retroactive interference would occur when students begin a second modern/world language which adversely affects their knowledge of their first new language.