Cognitive Load Theory for language teachers

Gognitive Load Theory was famously described by Dylan Wiliam as "the single most important thing for teachers to know". This post is all about cognitive load and Cognitive Load Theory, but with language teachers in mind. It is loosely adapted from our book Memory: What Every language Teacher Should Know (Smith and Conti, 2021).

So... you’re in a staff training session, facing a wall of text on a PowerPoint slide, while the presenter talks at a steady pace. You try to read, listen, and (if you are very assiduous) take notes all at once. Before long, you feel overwhelmed, you’ve missed a key point, and you’re thinking more about your to-do list than the training. (My own biggest bugbear is slides filled with too much text, with too little time to process it.)

Now think of your language class. They’re facing a bigger challenge: a teacher speaking in a new language, slides to look at, text to read, other students to listen to, instructions to process, and an enthusiastic teacher (that’s you!) waving their arms and urging you to give quick answers. It’s no wonder some students shut down. Their mental "desk space" is too cluttered (as my staffroom desk used to be). This, in a nutshell, is the problem of cognitive load.

What is cognitive load in more technical terms?

Simply put, cognitive load is the amount of mental effort being used in your working memory. Think of working memory as a student's mental "desktop" — where they hold and manipulate new information. But this desktop is tiny, fragile, and gets cluttered easily. Stuff is forgotten very quickly. My favourite analogy is when you are in the kitchen following a recipe and have to keep returning to the instructions because you couldn't remember the previous four steps.  (Working Memory theory suggests we can barely keep four items at a time in our working memory.) Or when someone tells you their name at a party and, with all the distractions, you instantly forget. 

When we ask students to understand a complex message, respond to it, and monitor their own performance, we put a huge strain on their working memory. (Listening is harder than reading, of course, because the message is transient.) The result may be confusion, hesitation, silence, errors, and  loss of self-efficacy (that belief that you can achieve a task successfully. The good news is that we teachers have the power to manage cognitive load through lesson design, pedagogy, procedures, techniques and choice of resources.

Now the theory...

Three Types of Cognitive Load: Intrinsic, Extraneous, and Germane

(Note: in recent times theorists have cast into doubt on the idea of Germane Cognitive Load, but I include it here anyway.)

A helpful way to think about cognitive load is to break it down into three types. Let's use a simple analogy: building a piece of flat-pack furniture.

1.  Intrinsic load: the inherent complexity of the task

This is how hard the thing itself is to learn.  Forming the future tense in French is easier (lower intrinsic load) than forming the passé composé. Technically speaking, the perfect tense has more ;'interacting elemnts' — more bits to piece together tp undedrstand the whole. You can’t change how inherently difficult a grammar point is, but you can break it down into smaller, step-by-step tasks to make it more manageable. Similarly, longer words tend to be harder to remember than shorter ones — they contain more phonemes and syllables.

2.   Extrinsic load: unhelpful "noise"

This is the load caused by unclear instructions, distracting graphics, or overly complicated steps. It's the mental effort wasted on things that don't help you understand a concept or carry out a task. This is the load we have the most control over. Examples include:

• putting unknown vocabulary in a drill that’s supposed to be focused on a verb tense;
• explaining a complex grammar rule entirely in the target language to a class that isn't ready for it;
• using a cluttered, hard-to-read worksheet;
• including too much text on a slide.
• designing a sentence builder with too much content.

Effective teaching cuts out this extraneous load, freeing up mental space.

3.  Germane load: the "sweet spot" for learning

This is the construct which has been questioned and which, to me, has always seemed the hardest to define. This is the best type of mental effort — the thinking that actually helps you build and strengthen knowledge in long-term memory. You might even think of it as an "aha!" moment when the instructions click and you see how the pieces fit together. This happens when students connect new information to what they already know. For example, linking a new verb tense to one they’ve already mastered.  Our goal is to minimise extraneous load so students have the mental capacity for this germane load.

The different types of cognitive load interact. The more extraneous "noise" we create, the less room there is for the good, germane learning. When we minimise the distractions and poor design (extraneous load), we free up space for students to tackle the inherent difficulty of the task (intrinsic load) and actually learn from it (germane load).

Schemas 

Based on work by theorists such as Bartlett, Rumelhart a a schema is broadly defined as a mental structure built from prior knowledge that helps learners understand and interpret new information by organising it into meaningful patterns. Examples in second language learning would be:

• Schema for describing people. A stored template for describing appearance and personality (age, hair, eyes, height, adjectives). Helps learners produce coherent descriptions.
• Travel / town vocabulary schema. Knowledge organised around the topic of town life—shops, services, directions. Helps with comprehension and recall when listening or reading about places.
• Daily routine schema. A framework of typical daily actions (je me lève, je prends mon petit-déjeuner, je vais au collège). Students use this schema to understand or produce new routine descriptions.
• Restaurant / food Schema. Familiar pattern for ordering food, menus, and typical expressions (je voudrais…, l’addition s’il vous plaît). Supports listening and speaking in realistic tasks.

In second-language acquisition, chunks (common sequences of words, multi-word units) behave very much like schemas because they:

• give learners ready-made patterns for expression;
• reduce working-memory demand while speaking or listening;
• provide frameworks to understand input faster and
• allow partial generalisation to new contexts (chunks can be adapted to create new meanings)

The more schemas students have in long-term memory, e.g. chunks of language (like high-frequency phrases or grammar patterns), the less they have to struggle to piece sentences together word-by-word. Fluency results when using language puts a very light load on working memory because the student can pull ready-made chunks from their long-term memory files.

The right level of difficulty

Our goal is to find the right amount of challenge — not too easy, not too hard. In second language acquisition, Stephen Krashen called this `i + 1`— providing input that is just one step beyond a student's current level. 

Key takeaways?

Being aware of cognitive load, we can:

• Break down information into digestible steps, for example when introducing a new tense, only do so one step at a time, ensuring each step is fully grasped. Inexperienced teachers often overestimate how much students can take in at a time.
• Focus on chunks more than isolated words — this makes more efficient use of working memory, has more communicative value and encourages fluency.
• When doing drills or question-answer sequences, scaffold prompts and questions carefully to ensure students do not have too many mental operations to carry out (an either-or question will be easier than an open-ended "Wh" question.
• Streamline resources and instructions to cut the "noise."
• Plan and scaffold activities so the challenge is at the right level — easier to harder.
• Keep the focus on the key learning goal, for example if the goal is to practise comparatives, don't confuse the issue of introducing new vocabu;ary at the same time.
• Keep language comprehensible, speaking at a moderate pace, incorporating repetition, pauses, gesture, pictures and occasional translation.
• Used "worked examples", for example when explaining new grammar.
• Use tools which make language comprehensible, such as sentence builders and parallel translations.
• Keep listening extracts short.
• Use activities such as "delayed dictation" and "delayed translation" to encourage mental rehearsal (repeating things over in your head, just as when you say a phone number over and over to remember it for the short and long term).
• Use Dual Coding (image + words) to clarify meaning and strenghen memory.
• Use spacing and retrieval practice (including testing/quizzing) to build strong schemas.
• Design lessons so that older material is constantly reviewed and interleaved with new material.
• Ensure total attention to tasks — if attention wavers information is missed and tasks become harder.
• Use formative assessment techniques to ensure material has been understood (e.g. mini whiteboards, cold call questioning).