WordAloud software "free" to English schools

WordAloud^® - teaching English and literacy worldwide

"Tell me and I forget. Teach me and I remember. Involve me and I learn." Benjamin Franklin

• Home
• Synthetic Phonics
• Synthetic phonics and WordAloud
• Teaching synthetic phonics
• Dr Seuss books
• Spelling rules
• Memory and learning
• Synthetic phonics FAQ
• Rose Interim Report
• Reading Reform Conference
• WordAloud
• Teaching English (TEFL)
• Learning English
• Teaching reading skills
• Dyslexia
• Reading Aid
• Talking browser
• Accessibility
• Reviews
• Free evaluation
• How to use WordAloud
• Prices
• Cloudworld
• About Cloudworld
• EU Projects
• Research
• Text capture
• Site Map
• Support
• Contacts

Memory and synthetic phonics

Learning involves perception, comprehension, retention and recall. There are various effects we can employ to increase the retention and recall processes. The list below is taken from a paper by Sharifian [1]. Many of these effects are employed by teachers, either instinctively or by training, but it is interesting to know their cognitive research basis. Furthermore the research results can be applied to improve teaching techniques.

Whereas this research shows various effects, it does not show the importance of repetition and practice in consolidating memory, nor the importance of developing memory skills, e.g. through games.

In this paper, I discuss the application of this research to the teaching of literacy skills, and in particular to synthetic phonics.

1. The Generation Effect

The generation effect means learners are likely to remember things they have generated in some way or another. Any activity included with the learning process is likely to enhance memory.

The "synthetic" aspect of synthetic phonics actually refers to a generation process, which helps to explain why the approach is so effective. Thus the pupil is taught to generate 'cat' from 'c', 'a' and 't'. This generation can be by sound, by typing letters, or by selecting objects (such as magnetic letters) and putting them together.

The research shows that spelling out a word helps you to remember the word. Also writing cues (or drawing pictures) is helpful in remembering the meaning of a word.

For remembering individual letters, it is useful to have some action that the pupils perform. Thus for the 's', the pupils might wriggle like a snake.

2. The Isolation Effect

The Isolation Effect, known also as the "von Restorff effect", refers to increased memory retention for anything which stands out from other items, when it is included among them. For example, if the word cat is put into a vocabulary list about food, such as bread, butter, jam, cake, etc., the memory for cat is enhanced. It is the context of similarity of the other items that matters in obtaining the isolation effect. Examples of isolation have been obtained with a difference in attributes: colour, size, voice, shape, meaningfulness, underlining, borders, noise, and so on. Teachers and authors may use this finding in designing language activities.

3. The Time-of-day Effect

Research has also shown changes in the efficiency of mental processes depending on the time of day when they are carried out. For example there are differences in efficiency of recall (comprehension and memory of a text) at different times of day. During the morning the surface linguistic forms were remembered better, but during the afternoon, semantic features were likely to be remembered better. Research also suggests that memorizing is best done before a period of tranquillity, such as sleep. Thus reading to a child at bedtime is particularly beneficial. One could teach a new phoneme sound and letter shape each evening, illustrated from a storybook. Then see if the child remembers in the morning, when presented with the illustration.

However it is useful to do a warm-up activity, to get the brain ready for learning, and for this purpose the recollection of previously learnt material is valuable.

4. The Serial-Position Effect

Serial-position effect refers to the experience that in memorizing a list of items or events, the first few items are remembered best, the last few next best, and the items in the centre are the hardest to recall. The higher recall for the first items on the list is called the primacy effect, and the better recall on end-of-list items is called the recency effect. Serial position effects have in fact been found in a variety of tasks, but the effects vary in the breadth of their extent.

Teachers may benefit from these memory effects in organizing to-be-learned materials. They may, for instance, present the most complex items at the beginning of and the next most complicated at the end of the lesson or the list.

Alternatively, extra attention may be directed to the middle items In phonics, the most complex rules, such as "magic e" (where a final 'e' lengthens the previous vowel), should be presented at the beginning of a lesson, with a recap at the end of the lesson.

5. The Spacing Effect

Research shows better recall when the repetition of items are spaced out rather than placed together during study. This is known as the spacing effect. This effect can be observed in almost any learning situation, and with any kind of learning material.

The spacing effect is useful to employ in phonics teaching, in which a lot of repetition is required for learning the shapes of letters, the mapping of phonemes to graphemes, and the rules and exceptions of spelling and pronunciation.

6. The Modality Effect

The modality effect concerns the finding that information presented orally is better remembered than presented visually. For example, researchers testing memory for the order of items in a list found higher accuracy for items which were heard rather than those which were seen. This advantage of oral presentation is probably because of the prosodic features of spoken language, which make it easier to remember chunks of words. However there is even better memorisation if information is presented in both auditory and visual modalities. It seems that the more modalities the better.

The modality effect is particularly relevant to synthetic phonics, where we start from the auditory domain, through building up phonemic awareness by showing how spoken words are composed of phonemes. The research confirms the benefits of simultaneous display of letters and their sounds, and subsequently the simultaneous display of words and their pronunciations. This is a feature of WordAloud.

7. The Self-Reference Effect

The self-reference effect concerns the finding that recall of language is improved when the language refers to the self, e.g. is written in the first person. The self-reference effect is found under many different conditions, for example when creating mental imagery, and with prose. Mental cues (such as "my room") that refer to "self" enhance free recall.

This effect can obviously obtained by having learning materials referring to the learner in person. And the words "I" and "my" have to be included very early in phonics teaching.

8. The Bizarreness Effect

The bizarreness effect concerns improved recall of things that are bizarre, counter-intuitive or extraordinary. This improvement is thought to be due to the increased mental effort of extracting the meaning.

The fruit fly examined the biologist under a microscope.

You need to spend mental effort in imagining this scene. The increase in mental effort seems to lead to lasting retention of visual and linguistic features which were associated with the mental processing. This principle helps to account for several other memory effects, for example the generation effect.

The bizarreness effect can easily be employed in phonics teaching, making it more fun. For example, we can construct first sentences such as "The mat sat on the cat."

9. The Encoding-Context Effect

Recall is helped if the learning context/situation is revived. Memory is improved if learning and testing happens in the same place or similar environment. The information about the context seems to be stored with the encoded memories, and helps to activate those memories.

For both in the classroom and at home, the context for phonics learning can be supplied by pictures. But, when testing the recall, the picture should be shown without the letter, word, or passage, which it was illustrating.

10. Processing-Difficulty Effect

Research shows that the greater the processing difficulty in memorising, the better the memorisation. Mental effort to learn or encode information helps in its recall. This helps to explain the "generation effect" and "bizarreness effect", see above.

While the teacher may desire to make learning as easy as possible, it is important to make that learning as active a process for the learner as possible. For example, when encountering a new word, the pupil should attempt to decode it by themselves. When the teacher introduces a new word, the pupil(s) should recompose the word out of letters and speak the sounds, so that actions and multiple senses are involved.

Reference

[1] "Memory Enhancement in Language Pedagogy: Implications from Cognitive Research" by Farzad Sharifian. See www.kyoto-su.ac.jp/information/tesl-ej/ej22/a2.htm.