Learning efficiency and Mathematics

       As you know I am a French teacher in a high school in Benejúzar and my humble thought is that didactics, and pedagogic studies in general, are still in the Stone Age of the learning efficiency.

           If you watch the interesting lecture  given  by Pascual  Cantos

https://canal.uned.es/mmobj/index/id/26544 you will see that mathematics and language are not divorced. Thanks to statistical tools we can find better ways of how to teach and learn a foreign language. One of the last points of this lecture was the lost of information after having read an article, and with the help of mathematics, we could find the best moment to review it in order to stop forgetting large parts of it or even all of it.

      For example, how do we proceed to remember a telephone number? We repeat this number several times consecutively. But it's not enough: we repeat it after a half an hour, and then maybe after some hours and finally a “memory dose” after some days to fix it forever. The issue is that if we could find a specific formula to determine how many repetitions we will  need, at what periods of time (and taking into account personal variables too), we would maximize our time and efforts to learn anything.

     To put it in another way, we can take an example from the scientific world. Water will never boil if we heat it at  slow temperature.

     Therefore, if I want to teach, for instance, how to use the verb to be, and I don't have enough time to repeat it several times and if the student doesn't put enough energy or concentration on the task , my efforts will lead nowhere.

     In fact, I'm concerned about the time available to teach French to my students and I'm afraid that It's not enough “for the water to boil”. As an optional subject, I have only two sessions a week for 1º, 2º and 3º de ESO. Imagine that situation: we start learning a given grammatical structure; after two or three days, the students have forgotten almost all of it and we have to start again. If the session had taken place the next day, the learned concepts would have been still fresh in the students minds and we would have worked on them deeper in order to stop forgetfulness.

     My hypothesis is that to learn a foreign language efficiently, we need, at least, 4 sessions a week and if we can not have them, It would be better not to start at all and do anything else instead.

     I hope that someone, one day, will find the formula to maximize the learning of a foreign language and minimize time and efforts.