Why Do I Need a Teacher When I’ve Got Google

told a group that the French for ‘chair’ is ‘chaise’ I may well have been saying that French for chair is ‘flub’ or ‘snerch’ or ‘ffffafaflaf’! They are all just strange sounds the teacher is making, made all the more nonsensical if she is at the front waving around a flash card. Then I came across the
Linkword
system developed by a Dr Michael Gruneberg 3 when he was at the University of Swansea. Think of learning new things a little like the game of Scatch, where you have a ball and a Velcro glove (catch for people who can’t catch – you know who you are … ). For the new things to stick you need to hook them into existing learning. It’s one of the reasons why pre-exposure to learning is effective (Kalla
et al
. 2001). But with foreign words, as with the learning of many new concepts, there is no prior knowledge to hook the new learning onto so it becomes like throwing a ball against a wall instead. How much of your teaching comes bouncing back at you because there is nothing to hook it into? The
Linkword
system, then, addresses this and combines it with the other aspects of enhancing memory I have mentioned above, namely we have a great memory for images, especially if they are weird, yucky, etc. … .
    So, for example, what is the French for ‘map’? If I say to a group of children that it is ‘la carte’ then for most of them, apart from the boy sitting at the front with his French–English dictionary sitting neatly on his desk along with his neat collection of pens who is able to tell me that the word ‘carte’ is etymologically linked to ‘cartography’ and hence maps, I am just spitting out a guttural phonic blob. And, then to make matters worse, I tell them that it is a feminine word. I then expect them to remember all of this when I test them tomorrow, along with nine other equally nonsensical phonic blobs of one gender or another. However, when I use the
Linkword
system (and remember this is not
the
way to learn a language, just
a
way) I can get them to imagine an old rickety wooden cart piled high full of maps that they are trying to drag out of the mud. What’s more, to help them remember the gender I get them to imagine pouring perfume over the maps. (According to the system, you should associate feminine words with ‘perfume’, masculine words with a ‘boxer’. If you find this a little sexist then replace with two other notions that you are happy with that clearly demark ‘male’ and ‘female’ in your world, such as ‘guns’ and ‘flowers’ or ‘beer’ and ‘Shake ‘n’ Vac’.) So, imagine pouring perfume over this pile of maps and they are all slipping and slithering about and the whole scene stinks. Or get them to imagine holdinga budgie over a lit candle (la bougie – candle) and spraying it with highly flammable perfume (feminine) or sticking a clove of garlic in your eye (ail – garlic) and hammering it home with a boxing glove (masculine). You get the idea. I haven’t got round yet to telling a group of children that the French for seal is ‘phoque’. And it involves a boxer … .
    In this way it is so easy and so much fun to learn, to remember, even to be unable to forget, key vocabulary that otherwise would take hours of slog, assuming that the learner did have the motivation for it in the first place.
    Remember I said that memory strategies could have a positive effect on self-esteem? I introduced the
Linkword
system to one of my bottom set groups when I was a real teacher and their test results went from one out of ten, two out of ten or ‘What test?!’ to ten out of ten. Some of these young people had never had ten out of ten in anything before, ever. They felt great. So did I. (It’s allowed.)
    The
Linkword
system for languages is just one example of the application of what we know about how to make learning memorable but there are plenty more and, once you understand the principles of making the ‘registration’ element of the learning process more effective, you can make your own up.
    My colleagues Roy Leighton and Dave Keeling came up with a simple little acronym of their own for summing up the many aspects that make learning memorable. It is that learning should RING. In other words, it should be ‘Relevant’ (in
Essential Motivation
I quoted neuroscientist Rita Carter as saying, ‘Items of interest … are retained better than those that are not. So personal and meaningful memories can be held in their brilliance while