Remembering

One of the most important processes in language acquisition is the remembering of what has been learned. Psychologically, memory is not a reservoir of past events. It is rather an adjustment between past impressions and present demands. It is not a faculty but a process, or rather a group of mutually related processes. From the point of view of behaviour, memory is the reproduction of previously encountered responses to a given stimulus.

Apart from abnormal causes like injuries and brain diseases, forgetting may be due to the fact that the material had been repressed by the mind as too difficult, that new patterns have replaced or interfered with it, that patterns have been too long without use, or that the material was badly patterned in the first place. A study of the causes of forgetting gives us a clue to some ten factors involved in remembering. Among them - psychological, linguistic, methodological and others.

1) psychological - who does the remembering (his age, his intentions, his experience);

2) linguistic - what is to be remembered (the material and its context, how it is learned, the amount of practice or repetition, the amount of time elapsed).

A method may favour any one of the three memory types - eye, ear, or motor.

A reading method favours the eye type; listening to the material of a course favours the ear type; and writing and speaking methods favour motor type. These types represent, of course, the predominant sense awareness. Only the blind and the deaf are all of one type to the exclusion of others.

Yet, the predominant memory type of the learner may well affect the skill he will most easily acquire and also his preference for one sort of staging over another. It may also affect the relative proportion of recognition of productive vocabulary that he is likely to master. Learners with fugitive memories may have difficulty with all the language skills.

Structure of a Lesson

A lesson involves a trade-off of activity between the teacher and the learner on the one hand and between the learners on the other. In recent years the types of activity, which constitute independent stages of a lesson (questioning, grading and marking, presentation, consolidation and repetition of new material), tend to be incorporated into a definite, flexible and variable structure. It may be said with some confidence that a sound, practical knowledge of these stages is central to successful teaching.

I. Organising for Instruction

The first stage involves preparation of students for language learning activity (organising for instruction). It is, first and foremost, the beginning of a lesson: greetings, transition to work, absences, lateness and information regarding the items to be discussed during the lesson.

Remembering that the beginning of a lesson provides plenty of communicative opportunities. The teacher asks about the pupils' weekend, talks about the weather, inquires about absentees. Phonetic drills are widely practised, commands and structural patterns could be recommended here (TPR and A-LM). A lasting practice of this technique seems to be loosing its instructional value because such dialogues are formal and do not arouse the pupils' interest. At an advanced stage (in the 9-11th grades) question-answer exercises give way to depicting a picture or a situation and prove effective (Suggestive Method, CM are often resorted to).

In senior classes listening comprehension can be recommended, followed by questions, answers, and other ways of checking understanding. The time span of this stage is 2-3 minutes.