[ELTWeekly Volume 10, Issue 10 | May 7, 2018 | ISSN 0975-3036]
* Published from Cambridge ELT Blog.
In this article Marcin Lewandowski looks at processing and memorising data in chunks, to aid vocabulary learning in the EFL classroom.
Let’s try a little experiment. Look at the following letters for a few seconds: R, O, Z, R, Y, W, K, A. Now, look away and write the letters on a sheet of paper from memory.
How did you do? Unless you know Polish, you might have struggled.
Let me explain. In order to remember the letters you have to keep all of them in your working memory. Chances are that you tried to remember the letters as letter names rather than phonemes. This puts a strain on your working memory which for an average person has a capacity of about 7 items (plus or minus two). This capacity to hold bits of information in your working memory is called a memory span (or a digit span when it’s tested on numbers).