Idea # 3

© Julia P via Flickr

Once upon a time I had to take GRE that stays for the Graduate Record Examinations. Besides a mildly intimidating math portion of the test, I had to tackle "the Verbal section". I'm not sure what ETS means by "verbal", but I've never seen words like that before. So, I had to learn about a thousand new lexical items... in two months. And here the Mnemonic Dictionary came along. I loved it to death! Moreover, I got completely hooked on creating my own mnemonics. Five years later I still remember many of those GRE words AND the mnemonics I made for them.

In case you don't know what mnemonic is and too hesitant to ask, look it up here - mnemonicdictionary.com :) For the rest of you: mnemonic is a memory shortcut, a clever/funny/crazy way to remember something. For instance, to remember the names of the Great Lakes, you can take the first letters of the lakes' names (Huron, Ontario, Michigan, Erie, Superior) and make a word out of them: HOMES. Certainly, for the language learners the goal will be to memorize foreign vocabulary. For certain languages with a limited number of cognates and not very transparent morphology/etymology, mnemonics could be the only way to learn new words.

There are many books written on mnemonics (my favorite is "Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything"). In SLA mnemonics are known as the Keyword Method (KWM). There is also a beautiful story of how the technique was invented (the Simonides Memory Palace and the method of loci) and used by many Greek philosophers. The main idea is that you create a powerful visual or acoustic image that would trigger a right association and deliver a desired item from the memory storage. 

As always, my concern was how to use mnemonics in the most effective and systematic way with my students. Ideally, I would love to create an online mnemonic dictionary for the Russian language - similar to this. To do that, however, one should know how to code. Unfortunately, programming is not my strongest skill ( I'm learning), so I decided to set up a simple blog, where each post - created by me - would announce a current topic and then students would come up with their mnemonics in the comments section. To give it a slight push, I assigned it as a part of the homework: while learning new vocabulary at home, each student had to come up with at least one mnemonic and leave one comment on somebody else's mnemonic. The amount of amazing mnemonics students created was just shocking! My forever favorite is a mnemonic for the Russian word "истребитель" (istrebitel' = a fighter plane) that was successfully remembered as "Easter beater" (a crazy flying monster that destroys Easter eggs, according to the students). 

By the way, the current research says that it's not necessary to create your own mnemonics - one can benefit from pre-made mnemonics just the same... And no, KWM doesn't cause the chronic misspelling syndrome, as some teachers believe. Students perfectly understand that "Easter beater" is not exactly equal to "истребитель". 

Mnemonics can be used for grammar, phonetic rules, and other difficult concepts to remember. When my students struggle with a new thing - an especially long word or a challenging conjugation pattern, we brainstorm it together and often come up with a great mnemonic that serves us well the whole year (for instance, did you know, that the Genitive plural ending -ов is just the Russian version of English "of") .  

Let me know, if you have any ideas on how to record and work with mnemonics.

Happy remembering and happy teaching!