MEMORY AND UNDERSTANDING

1^st. passage: easy to remember because you understand it, and understand all the words in it.

2^nd. passage: difficult to remember because it contains many ‘difficult’ words i.e. words you do not understand, so you do not understand the whole passage.

3^rd. passage: almost impossible to remember because you do not understand the words, and the whole passage is meaningless to you. (In fact this passage is a ‘nonsense’ poem, written in words made up by the author, which have no real meaning.)

TYPES OF WORDS OR VOCABULARY

Vocabulary means a group of words. Our vocabulary is all the words we know.

1. Our active vocabulary: words we know, understand and use ourselves.

2. Our passive vocabulary: words we have seen and know the meaning of, but do not know well enough to use ourselves.

3. Unknown words: words we have not seen, or do not understand at all.

The amount of these three kinds of vocabulary which we use affects our students’ ability to remember notes or explanations.

• Easy to remember: notes or explanations using our students’ active vocabulary will be easy to understand and remember.

• Difficult to remember: notes or explanations using our students’ passive vocabulary will be more difficult to understand and remember.

• Impossible to remember: notes or explanations using many unknown words will not be understood or remembered at all.

IN OUR TEACHING

• When we write notes on the board or explain things in class we should always try to use the students’ active vocabulary.

• Remember that this may be different from our own active vocabulary.

• Simplify any notes copied at College or from a textbook. Change the vocabulary of our notes to put them into the students’ active vocabulary.

• There are some technical words not in the students active vocabulary which we must use, as they are an essential part of our subject e.g. piston, carbohydrates, erosion.

• If we use new or difficult words we should explain them first.

• It is good to use some new words to widen the students’ vocabulary, but not so many that they find it hard to understand.

• As students begin to understand and practice these words, they will become part of their active vocabulary.

• The danger with a passage like passage 2 is that students may try to learn it off by heart without understanding it, and this will not help them to learn anything useful.

Example of simplification

Passage 2 could be simplified as follows:

Erosion washes away the top part of the soil or soil in ditches or gullies. Rain hits the soil and washes it away if it does not have much humus or dead plant matter in it.

Note: We have retained erosion, gully and humus, as they are important in learning agriculture, but we have explained each of them or added alternative words.

We have simplified the non-technical words like impact and deficient, as students do not need to know these words to learn this subject.

Problems

• Some teachers feel they need to use difficult words to prove that they know more than their students, or are highly educated. They have “swallowed a dictionary”.

• Some students admire teachers who use difficult words, as they think it proves they are clever.

• It is easier to copy notes you made at school or College, or to copy from a text book, than to make up your own notes.

Answers

• If you confuse your students with difficult words and they learn nothing, does that prove that you are highly educated or that you are a bad teacher?

• Who is clever: the teacher who confuses students or the teacher who can help them to understand complex things in simple language?

• The third point is just laziness. Perhaps you should not be teaching if you are not willing to make the effort to make sure your students understand what you are teaching them.