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Getting Students to Remember Structures: Brain-based
Learning Into Practice
Ana M.
Leiguarda
Graduate Teacher of English as a Foreign Language from the School
of Languages, National University of Cordoba, Argentina. (1997)
Teacher-in-training in the subject English Language I, School of Languages,
National University of Cordoba(1998-1999). Primary and Secondary School
Teacher. Worked as a Counselor and Credit Teacher of Spanish for Concordia
Language Villages, MN USA (1999). Especially interested in the field of
brain-based learning. Author of the articles "Making it Memorable" and
"Authentic Appeal" English Teaching Professional
There are
things that we hardly ever forget even when we made no effort to remember them.
There are others that we struggle to remember, however, and no matter how hard
we try, we eventually forget . The need to find a reason for this motivated my
research into brain-based learning. Brain- based learning tries to facilitate
the way in which people learn and store information, by using activities that
help activate the several memory lanes in which the brain stores information.
If we reflect
on our memories we will discover that we are more likely to remember incidents
that moved us. We may not be very good at remembering jokes, for instance, but
when somebody starts telling a joke we heard before, we usually recognize it
and start laughing before it is over. Most of us remember catchy songs or TV
ads even when we made no effort to memorize them. And why is this so? Maybe, it
is simply because we had fun with the jokes, or were amused by the song lyrics
or impressed by the ads.
How can we
help our students internalize grammar structures more easily and effectively?
According to Sprenger (1999), in order to be permanent, learning has to follow
some paths. She calls these paths "lanes". Memories are stored into five of
these lanes, which are specific areas of the brain. She says that just as
supermarkets have different aisles for different products, the human brain has
special places where information is stored. Five memory lanes have been
identified: semantic, episodic, procedural, automatic and emotional.
The first
memory lane contains information learned from words, such as the one learned
from textbooks or lectures. The main advantage of this kind of memory is that
it has immense capacity to store new information. It is the most difficult lane
to use, however, since to retain information in this lane, the data must be
processed several times for long-term storage to occur. When we teach new
language without contextualization we are using this lane only. The lack of a
context makes the information very hard to remember.
The second
memory lane, the episodic one, relies heavily on locations. Surroundings play
an important role since the place where somebody is at the moment of learning
can help them trigger the memory later on in the same location. For this
reason, using posters, displaying new structures and patterns, or word-webs in
the classroom is essential. The classroom is always a context for the new
information and for this reason, in test situations, it is easier to remember
for students when they are tested in the same room. The students unconsciously
memorize the information, and even when the posters are no longer displayed,
they help students remember the data.
With our
procedural memory lane we learn how to do things, such as how to tie our shoes.
It is also called "muscle memory" because it stores information learnt by the
body through successive repetition of a sequence or procedure .This information
is learnt when it becomes a routine. We can activate this lane when teaching
grammar, for instance. Since word order is a frequent mistake for non-native
speakers, placing the different parts of a sentence in the body and then
following a sequence to form the sentence may help students internalize word
order effectively.
The automatic
lane is also known as "conditioned response memory"(Jensen, 1998). Memories
that are triggered by certain stimuli are stored in this path. It is accessed
through mimicry, music and other repetitive devices. Triggering this memory
lane may activate the other four lanes. To practice adjectives or verbs, for
instance, flashcards and mimicry can be used. Mimicry and flashcards, thus,
work as an automatic trigger for the word.
Our emotional
memory is the most powerful kind of memory. Emotions play a key role in
learning. Emotions activate chemicals that stimulate the brain (McGaugh et.
al., 1990) and when the brain is stimulated , recall becomes easier. What we
learn is strongly influenced by our emotions. Memories of an emotional kind
will always take precedence over other memories (LeDoux, 1996). In general,
using fun-like activities, making the students feel comfortable and safe in
class helps them remember more easily. The brain likes novelty; it is attracted
to it and thus pays attention to new things (Jensen, 1998). If the students are
motivated, they will process information better and assimilate the language
better, too.
When
learning, information can be stored into any of these lanes depending on the
nature of the information, but also on the nature of the situation. Some topics
may have very little emotional content in themselves, but we can use several
techniques to store the information into the five memory lanes.
Effective
teaching should engage the students’ emotions. Bearing in mind that all
lanes should be accessed and especially the emotional one, we will proceed by
exemplifying how this can be done when teaching a verb construction such as the
Past Continuous. We will focus on the kind of activities that aim at storing
information in different areas of the brain so as to boost retrieval in the
long run.
Techniques
and games:
A murder:
A detective
story can be used to introduce the topic. Some –ing forms are written on
the board and a dialog between a detective and the suspects is played. In order
to reduce the students’ stress level, they are asked to listen to the
dialog and circle the gerunds they identify. Then some actions in the Past
Continuous are written on the board such as "was playing tennis, was buying a
newspaper" together with a list of the suspects’ names. At random and
before listening to the dialog the students have to match and predict what the
people were doing when "Mr. Pound" was murdered. The students then listen to
the dialog to check whether they are right about their predictions. Through
this activity the emotional lane mainly is accessed because the students feel
at ease when approaching the new topic. This activity serves to give confidence
to all the students, even the weaker ones, since they do not feel the pressure
to understand what the dialog is about. The new verb tense is introduced in a
context that helps the students grasp the use of the Past Continuous to talk
about events in progress during a period of time in the past.
Follow-up
poster:
As a
follow-up activity a poster can be displayed on the board. In the center of the
poster the phrase " Between 9 and 10 a.m." is written and around it ,the
suspects’ faces and names. Under each name there should be an acronym like
1) b-the-n, 2) pl-t, 3) r-a-m , that stand for an action in the past
continuous: 1) buying the newspaper, 2) playing tennis, 3) reading a magazine).
The students have to recall the actions they have heard so as to decipher the
acronyms. The use of a poster containing faces, names and acronyms helps access
the emotional and episodic lanes. Instead of asking the students to report on
the actions they remember, this activity is turned into a game and thus the
students’ emotions are engaged.
"Photographs":
The students
can be shown magazine pictures and be told that these pictures are in fact
photographs taken in a park when a robbery occurred. First, about fifteen
pictures are put inside a big envelope and then only a part of the picture is
exposed. The students have to say sentences like "They were having a picnic".
Another set of pictures can be displayed on the board and the students have to
close their eyes while a volunteer removes one. The volunteer asks "what was
he/she doing?" and a student should guess " He was playing the guitar". Through
these activities the episodic and the automatic lanes are activated. The use of
visual material helps activate the episodic memory. When the pictures are taken
from the board, the space left by the picture removed helps the students recall
the action. A link is established between a verb in the Past Continuous and a
picture during the first activity. In the second activity the pictures help
trigger the action, thus the automatic lane is used.
Run for
it:
Running aims
at raising the students’ energy level. Moving around helps the students
increase the level of oxygen and makes them be more alert. Before playing the
game, some pairs of hand-made drawings are used to exemplify the contrast
between Simple Past and Past continuous. We can use, for instance a picture of
as a girl, called Sharon, riding a bike and another of a bike crashed into a
tree. The students are asked to say which action was longer and they are asked
to identify the interruption. Then they match both pictures and form the
sentence "Sharon was riding a bike when she crashed into a tree". Then, some
pairs of pictures should be displayed inside and outside the classroom. The
students get together in groups of four and they have to run in and out of the
classroom to find the pairs and write the sentences. A variation may be
introduced by using sentences instead of pictures. Cards containing sentences
are displayed on the board face down and the students have to find the pairs.
The automatic memory lane is activated through this game since pictures as well
as sentences serve as a stimulus to trigger a response. The emotional memory
lane is activated through the challenge and fun of the game itself. Through
memory games, the same structure is repeated over and over again and the
students usually enjoy doing it.
Body
grammar:
This activity
is based on the activity presented by Anne Dwyer in her article "Body talk,
where she explains how to use the upper part of the body to form questions. I
decided to use the body, too, to practice affirmative and negative statements
to create a link between movement and language so as to help activate the
episodic and procedural lanes mainly. The students can be taught how to place
the different parts of speech on their bodies so as to help them internalize
word-order easily. A sketch of a person is drawn on the board. On the head the
subject of the sentence is placed, on the neck, the auxiliary verb (to be), on
the navel is the gerund, on the hips, the direct object, on the knees any other
prepositional phrases, and on the feet the rest of the sentence. A volunteer is
asked to say any sentence in the past continuous and the different parts of it
are placed on the sketch. I (head) was (neck) eating (navel) ice-cream (hips)
with my boyfriend (knees) in the sitting room (feet). If the sentence is in the
negative, a cross is drawn on the neck. So as to represent the different
pronouns, the students are taught how to do it through mimicry. Then, a list of
sentences is read and the students have to point to the different parts of
their body to represent what is said. This technique helps activate all the
memory lanes at the same time, but the procedural one specifically. Information
learnt through the body is more easily internalized and retrieved since a
strong link is created between the movement and the part of speech. By doing
this repeatedly, the students unconsciously learn the procedure for sentence
forming. The students can try the language for themselves, have fun, and feel
less self-conscious when making mistakes so this procedure also activates the
emotional lane.
Student’s reactions:
After the
methodology was applied, the students were asked to give their impressions of
it. These are some of the things they said: " Mimicry helps me remember things
better"; "I understand better by playing";" We learn and have fun"; "I learn a
lot without so much effort". Most of the students (85%) found the class fun and
nice and a few (15%) said they found it boring, mainly because they did not
understand the language or found the mimicry a bit tiring.
Conclusions:
According to
a study conducted by Sprenger, cramming can help students pass a test with a
good mark, but that is not a good learning strategy for remembering the
information after a longer period of time. When the students learn information
through cramming instead of internalizing it through the different memory
lanes, the information gets stored in the semantic area of the brain only. In
this way, remembering becomes more difficult since the brain is deprived of an
external aid to retrieve the information. Students may be successful in a test
without being exposed to these kinds of activities and, in like manner,
students may fail in spite of being exposed to this methodology. The difference
between traditional methods and brain-based learning may be noticed in the
students’ performance in the long run. Brain- based activities can, to a
great extent, help the students process language better by activating the
brain’s memory lanes. But this is just the first step towards learning the
language.
References
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