Forum Deutsch - University of Alberta

HERBST 2005 39 Forum Deutsch
If all the above mentioned research is correct, this type of
memory strategy should be extremely effective. To check the
effectiveness of this strategy, students 3 were taught 15 words 4 in
German or 10 words in French with this method. Twenty-four
hours later, the learners were quizzed on these words. They were
also quizzed 10 days and 10 weeks later on the same words. Each
quiz was a pop quiz and different in format. The participants in
the control groups were given the same list of words on the same
day as the test groups were taught the words with the abovementioned
strategy. The control groups were told to learn the
words on the list. (They were allowed to do so in any way they
chose.) The control groups were given the same quizzes at the
same times as the test groups. The results from students who took
all three quizzes were the basis of this study. These results are in
Table 1. The test groups in comparison to the control groups
were approximately 10% better for German and 14% for French
for the twenty-four hour testing. However, at the 10 day testing
there was no significant difference between the two groups for
either German or French. I attribute this slight variation to the
use of these words in regular class work during the 10 day period.
Interestingly enough, at the 10 week testing, the test groups
were almost 18% better for German and more than 13% for
French than the respective control groups. I believe this significant
difference is due to the use of visual, auditory and kinesthetic
images that the students produced while using this technique.
The students in the test groups for each language were able to
more effectively store these words in long-term memory. Logie
(1995) maintains that using visual and auditory input for shortterm
memory supports the effective transfer of information into
long-term memory and I believe that the kinesthetic aspects of this
technique provide the positive emotions for successful learning.
Control Test Difference
groups groups in %
German French German French German French
(PARTICIPANTS) 21 25 25 54
Quiz 1 70.0 % 62.4 % 79 % 76.8 % 9 % 14.4 %
Quiz 2 93.0 % 93.2 % 94.6 % 95.3 % 1.6 % 2.1 %
Quiz 3 59.5 % 72.8 % 76.8 % 85.9 % 17.3 % 13.1 %
Table 1: Results of effectiveness of vocabulary strategy for
German and French.
______________
3 The students were college level students who were taking their second semester of beginning
German or their second semester of beginning French.
4 These words came from the students’ textbook. They were new words introduced in the
chapter students would start after they were taught the words with the above strategy. So
the words were relevant to the work being done in class.
Conclusion
In the preceding article, we have discussed briefly what learning
strategies are, e.g., how they are sequenced, and we looked at
memory strategies more closely. Through the research presented
here, we have seen that it is necessary to use as many of our
senses as possible in our learning strategies. The improper use of
a sense or the deletion of one or more senses in a learning strategy
can be detrimental to its proper implementation. This
research has shown that the proper use of at least three senses
in learning vocabulary is very conducive to successful vocabulary
acquisition.
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