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.
