Vocabulary Mega Memory: Memory-based Learning Techniques of Vocabulary

Vocabulary is the building blocks of any language and a valid useful indicator of a L2 learner’s competence and proficiency. The more vocabulary L2 learners know, the better they can understand and use the language. A big vocabulary repertoire improves the learner’s abilities to articulate their ideas, thoughts, and emotions through speaking and writing, and helps them express exactly what they mean and opens them up to a variety of reading and listening materials. Generally the process of vocabulary learning is seen as a constant change of the learner’s memory, and this change results in the development and growth of their vocabulary repertoire. Memory is one of the factors which can be used to predict the performance of L2 learner and measure their natural aptitude for learning a foreign language. Research confirms that learners with strong memory skills tend to excel at learning because powerful memory helps them exploit their learning potential significantly. However, memory skills are too often overlooked in schools; they are simply expected to develop without giving them any careful support and attention. Memory skills are included in all stages of language acquisition, namely language processing, comprehension and production. When learning vocabulary, the learners need to encode and process the vocabulary input, store it, and retrieve it so that they can comprehend and manipulate the language being uttered or read. This book emphasizes the importance of memory in the process of vocabulary learning. It shows the basic mental processes and operations the learners perform when they learn new vocabulary, mainly how they sense, perceive, process, store, recall and produce vocabulary. It is assumed that when we know the stages of learning vocabulary and the cognitive processes the learners perform during each stage, this would help us recognize the problems that might occur during each stage of learning, choose the best ways to deal with or avoid these problems, and select the best instructional techniques that help the learners make the maximum use of their mental abilities to learn vocabulary effectively. The book also touches upon the vocabulary forgetting problems and suggests practical solutions for them. Moreover, it highlights the multisensory instruction, practice, and reviewing of vocabulary as good ways for enhancing vocabulary memory storage in multiple regions of the cortex. The metacognitive knowledge about the process of learning vocabulary which teachers get from this book, helps them to control and evaluate their own strategies of teaching vocabulary and reflect upon their current practices of presenting vocabulary, provides a solid ground for choosing one instructional strategy over another in each stage of vocabulary learning, and helps them select the appropriate activities for each stage and assess its effectiveness. The practical vocabulary memory boosters and techniques offered in the book encourage the learners to adopt vocabulary learning strategies which will boost their vocabulary memory storage and retrieval strengths. Teachers need to give careful consideration to the teaching materials and techniques that they use to present vocabulary in class. They need to think about what they can add to the materials in front of their learners to make them memorable. The accumulative knowledge about the functions of human brain and memory techniques is skillfully employed in the field of vocabulary learning to enable the learners to learn vocabulary faster and more effectively, and make use of their learning potential to the maximum. I hope the ideas included in this book will capture the reader’s attention and entice them to replace the ineffective techniques of learning vocabulary that they might be using with the tried and tested memory- based techniques of learning vocabulary.