Skip to main content

Pyramid memory speed test

You've probably heard of the retrieval practice effect (aka the testing effect). It's all the rage in England and for pretty good reasons. Good teachers have always assumed it strengthens students' memories to test them on material they have previously learned and may forget. Multiple studies have confirmed the power of the retrieval practice effect. In a nutshell, the idea is that we test to learn, not just to test. Gianfranco and I wrote about it in our book Memory: What Every Language Teacher Should Know (2021).

Over a year or more I have been designing low-prep starters for frenchteacher.net and today I added another retrieval practice starter on basic vocabulary. This one, 'Pyramid memory speed test' also encourages students to recall quickly, fostering what researchers such as Paul Nation and Norman Segalowitz might call cognitive fuency. Cognitive fluency, the ability to quickly retrieve language from memory, is vital for communication of course, so anything we do in the classroom to help build cognitive fluency is likely to be useful.

The pyramid memory game puts students under time pressure. It's explained in the slide below, after which there are two examples of slides fearuring beginner vocabulary. The game also requires a lots of repetitions of the same words.

The only caveat I'd like to point out is that this little competitive game is all about the retrieval and production of isolated words. As you know, in general I prefer activities during which students use chunked or connected language, since this is what they will need to do to communicate. (A basic rule of thumb for learning is that you get good at what you practise.) But for beginners who are building their vocabulary, I can see a place for sometimes teaching through isolated words.

For another use of pyramids see this post by Silvia Bastow which includes Gianfranco Conti's 'pyramid translation' game which Gianfranco and I described also in Breaking the Sound Barrier: Teaching Language Learners How to Listen (2019).




Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

What is the natural order hypothesis?

The natural order hypothesis states that all learners acquire the grammatical structures of a language in roughly the same order. This applies to both first and second language acquisition. This order is not dependent on the ease with which a particular language feature can be taught; in English, some features, such as third-person "-s" ("he runs") are easy to teach in a classroom setting, but are not typically fully acquired until the later stages of language acquisition. The hypothesis was based on morpheme studies by Heidi Dulay and Marina Burt, which found that certain morphemes were predictably learned before others during the course of second language acquisition. The hypothesis was picked up by Stephen Krashen who incorporated it in his very well known input model of second language learning. Furthermore, according to the natural order hypothesis, the order of acquisition remains the same regardless of the teacher's explicit instruction; in other words,
4 comments
Read more

What is skill acquisition theory?

For this post, I am drawing on a section from the excellent book by Rod Ellis and Natsuko Shintani called Exploring Language Pedagogy through Second Language Acquisition Research (Routledge, 2014). Skill acquisition is one of several competing theories of how we learn new languages. It’s a theory based on the idea that skilled behaviour in any area can become routinised and even automatic under certain conditions through repeated pairing of stimuli and responses. When put like that, it looks a bit like the behaviourist view of stimulus-response learning which went out of fashion from the late 1950s. Skill acquisition draws on John Anderson’s ACT theory, which he called a cognitivist stimulus-response theory. ACT stands for Adaptive Control of Thought.  ACT theory distinguishes declarative knowledge (knowledge of facts and concepts, such as the fact that adjectives agree) from procedural knowledge (knowing how to do things in certain situations, such as understand and speak a language).
Post a Comment
Read more

12 principles of second language teaching

This is a short, adapted extract from our book The Language Teacher Toolkit . "We could not possibly recommend a single overall method for second language teaching, but the growing body of research we now have points to certain provisional broad principles which might guide teachers. Canadian professors Patsy Lightbown and Nina Spada (2013), after reviewing a number of studies over the years to see whether it is better to just use meaning-based approaches or to include elements of explicit grammar teaching and practice, conclude: Classroom data from a number of studies offer support for the view that form-focused instruction and corrective feedback provided within the context of communicative and content-based programmes are more effective in promoting second language learning than programmes that are limited to a virtually exclusive emphasis on comprehension. As teachers Gianfranco and I would go along with that general view and would like to suggest our own set of g
2 comments
Read more