Forget to Remember!

Understanding why we forget is as important as understanding why we remember. Both help us become better learners. In fact, forgetting is, surprisingly, essential to good learning. This is because if you forget something you have learned, you can relearn it in a somewhat new context, and it will be combined with traces of the previous learning. Forgetting is also necessary when you are overwhelmed with new material to learn. It’s like a storm drain: it prevents flooding. Some of the things that can go wrong are retrieval errors, lost data, and overwritten information. Retrieval errors occur when you know something but just cannot seem to remember it. You have probably experienced retrieval errors before – not just in foreign-language classes but in other subject areas, too. The answer may be on the tip of your tongue, but you just cannot get it to come out right. This is pretty normal, and while it is frustrating, there is little that you can do about it (at least until psychologists do some more research in this area and come up with some aids), so you might as well shrug it off and find an alternative way to say what it is you had in mind. Since the expressions are in your memory somewhere, if you do not obsess about what happened, you will most likely be able to recall the “forgotten” item the next time you need it. If you just cannot let go of the fact that you do know the word or information you are after, sometimes association will help: where did you hear the information, what else is related to that information, what even might sound like the information? If you know the information, it will come to you later – isn’t that always the way? – and you can reinforce it for the next time by using it in a number of new situations so that there are even more associations that you can make when you next need it. Sometimes information  is lost. This may be because it never made it into permanent memory in the first place. Perhaps it did not stay long enough in short-term memory and the “trace” of the information decayed to the point that it became unrecoverable. Perhaps it did make it to long-term memory, but was not used enough and had no associations to place it into permanent memory. In any event, lost data must be relearned; it will not show up again in the future on its own. Once found, however, more and more intersecting paths will become accessible very quickly. Most language learners who had good proficiency in a language that they have not spoken for a number of years can reclaim that language in pretty short order. Agree to disagree yet human memory has a number of characteristics in common with computers. One characteristic in particular is unfortunate: new information can overwrite (i.e. eliminate) old information. Some well-known studies have been made of people who witnessed accidents or historical events but later changed their testimony without even realizing it. If some of the information you learn in language class is overwritten by new information (e.g. after you learn the past tense, you find that you have forgotten present-tense forms), there is nothing to be done except to relearn the old information – without blaming yourself for having a bad memory. The memory itself is not at fault here; it is normal for related information to overwrite information that already exists. One way to prevent this from happening to you in language classes is to repeat old information (e.g. continue to use the present tense on a regular basis) while learning new, related information.

It has  to be pointed out that there is a positive aspect of overwriting information. It is fortunate that this phenomenon happens, especially in language learning, because we can continually overwrite previously learned inaccurate or inadequate language on our way to being more precise.

Bibliography:

1. Brown, H.D. (2000): Principles of Language Learning and Teaching. White Plains, NY: Addison Wesley Longman, Inc. Gass,
2. S.M. I L. Selinker. (2008): Second Language Acquisition. An Introductory Course. New York: Routledge. VanPatten,
3. Leaver, B.L; Ehrman, M; Shekhtman, B. (2005): Achieving Success in Second Language Acquisition. CUP
4. B. i J. Williams. (red.) 2007: Theories in Second Language Acquisition. Mahwah, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Publishers.   ©