Remember to Remember:

A Field study of Metamemory and Memorization

By Annica Schjott Voneche

In their review of memory research Tulving and Madigan state that one of the truly

unique characteristics of human memory: [is] its knowledge of its own knowledge

(p. 477). My field of interest for this study was to investigate a particular type of

metacognition, namely metamemory, that is to say the introspective knowledge of ones

own memory capacities and strategies that can aid memory (Pannu & Kaszniak 2005, p.

105). Specifically, I was interested in how the test subjects went about memorizing

vocabulary, how aware they were of what constitutes a good or bad memorization

strategy, as well as of the reasons why certain memorization strategies are more efficient

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than others. Ultimately, I hope that my study would help inform the best way of

designing vocabulary tutoring in online software for foreign language learning, on which

I am currently working.

Procedure

My test subjects were four Northwestern students between the ages of 19 24. Three of

them were undergraduate students. All of them were of English mother tongue with no

previous knowledge of Swedish, but are or have previously been studying at least two

foreign languages. Subject 1, Catherine, is a major in journalism and theatre. Subject 2,

Naomi is a linguistics major, subject 3 Kerry is a major in International Relations, and

subject 4, Lisa, the only graduate student, holds a B.A. in English and is currently a

Master student in Learning Sciences. The undergraduate students are all enrolled in the

second quarter of introductory level French, and the graduate student has a background of

studying Spanish.

The task was to memorize 18 previously unknown Swedish words and to recall

them in random order based on their English translation. I chose words in Swedish

because I wanted to be reasonably sure none of the subjects had any prior knowledge of

the language on which they would be tested. However, I wanted to use words in a

language where it would still be possible for the subjects to find similarities between at

least some of the words in English and the target language. Swedish fulfilled both of

these criteria, given that it is a small language spoken only by around 9 million people in

the world (Renter 1992, p. 101), which limits the likelihood that my subjects would have

much, if any, previous knowledge of the language. However, because Swedish and

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English are both Germanic languages, they do have common roots and partially similar

vocabulary.

Before they begun I read the words aloud in order to provide them with the right

pronunciation, given the differences between Swedish and English spelling, but I told

them the pronunciation of the words was not important. These were the 18 words I used

in the study: lek (play), gatlopp (gauntlet), tung (heavy), bricka (tray), butelj (bottle),

cykel (bike), jord (earth), ko (cow), gift (poison), svart (black), fnster (window),

armbge (elbow), lila (purple), skorsten (chimney), blmrke (bruise), ktenskap

(marriage), bil (car), svrt (difficult).

I chose words that I predicted would be of variable difficulty for the learners to

memorize because I wanted to see if the subjects would use different memorization

techniques depending on the perceived level of difficulty of the word to be memorized.

Some words are very similar in the two languages, such as gatlopp (gauntlet) and ko

(cow). Other words are false friends, meaning they are more or less perfect homonyms,

spelled in the same or similar fashion but with different meanings in the two languages,

such as bricka (close to the English word brick), gift (with a different pronunciation and

meaning, but spelled identically to the English word gift) and bil (that is spelled similarly

to bill in English). On the other end of the spectrum of what I predicted would be the

level of difficulty are words like skorsten and ktenskap that bear no resemblance to any

English words, and which contain the consonant clusters -rst, -kt, and -sk that are rare in

English. In between these two extremes are words that resemble words that the subjects

might know in language other than English, such as fnster (finestra in Italian, fenestra in

Latin, fentre in French, or defenestration in English) and butelj (bouteille in French,

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botella in Spanish), and words that the subjects might attempt to learn by breaking them

apart. Examples of the latter are words such as armbge (elbow) that might be broken up

into the two parts as arm + bow, blmrke (bruise) that can be broken up into the two

parts blue + mark. Finally, there is a fourth group containing words such as lila (purple)

that may encourage the subjects to learn by way of association. In this case, the word lila

might lead them to associate to lilac, which in turn is often purple in color, or the word

cycle (bike) that can easily be associated with bicycle.

Data collection

In the first step of the interview I explained that I was interested in studying how students

learn vocabulary in foreign languages, and that I would present them with 18 Swedish

words for them to memorize and to recall based on their English equivalent in random

order. I also explained that I wanted them to do a think aloud both while they attempted

to memorize the words and during the recall phase. Because I didnt know if they were

familiar with what a think aloud was, I explained it to them, and as a warm up exercise I

asked them to think aloud while counting the number of windows at their parents house.

After the warm-up I told them that they could use any technique they wanted to

memorize the words and that they had a maximum of 15 minutes to do so. During these

15 minutes I remained fairly passive, and only spoke to them to remind them to verbalize

their thoughts in case they forgot. When the 15 minutes were up I asked the subjects to

take a test where I presented the English translations of the words in random order, and

they had to write down the Swedish equivalent. I videotaped the subjects both during the

study phase and during the recall phase in order to capture everything they said without

having to be distracted by writing it down. After the recall phase, I had a discussion with

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the subjects about anything unusual or unclear that happened during the memorization or

recall phases in order to get a clearer picture of what went through their mind at certain

instances. I would base these questions partially on notes I took during this phase. Often,

the questions revolved around the words that they seemed to find the hardest to recall, in

addition to words that they recalled in manners that were not immediately obvious to me.

After this recall stage, that generally lasted for about five minutes, in addition to

two to three minutes of clarification questions on my part, I asked the subjects to look at

seven PowerPoint slides with images that are often used in other types of memory tests

(see Appendix) in order for them to tell me how they would go about recalling these

images had they been part of the memorization study. I did this in order to get a fuller

picture of their view of their own memorization strategies, and also to determine if there

was something particular about remembering words as opposed to, for example, images.

This part of the study lasted for approximately ten minutes.

Interview Summaries

Subject 1, Catherine, started the memorization by asking me for a piece of scrap

paper that she used to make flash cards, because she explained this was her method of

choice when memorizing vocabulary. When pressed on her reasons for doing so she

explained that it was because she is a visual learner, and that the flash cards helped her

visualize the words in her head. However, her actual techniques for vocabulary

memorization was mainly based on associations, rote memorization and identifying

patterns, resemblances and differences between the Swedish words and their English

equivalent. For the full fifteen minutes, she would either work on creating the flash cards,

or turning them over again and again in order to memorize the words. She would start by

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going over all of them, and then gradually put to the side those that she felt she had

mastered and focus on those she still found difficult, in particular those that were very

different from the English equivalent, such as ktenskap, skorsten, and the minimal pair

svart and svrt. After having gone through three rounds where she eliminated flash cards

from the stack she was still working on she put all of the cards back together and shuffled

them, explaining that she did this so that she wouldnt just learn them in order, given that

she knew I would ask her to recall them in random order. In a final phase, she went over

the spelling of all of them, focusing in particular on the words containing the letters , ,

with which she was unfamiliar. What was particularly interesting was how she linked

the minimal pair svart - svrt (black - difficult) and recalled them by telling herself that

black and difficult are the same except difficult is more difficult because it had a circle

over the a. Thus, she would at the same time link two words with similar spelling

together, and use a mnemonic both to remember which one contained the letter , and to

link the meaning of the words in Swedish with the way they are spelled. However, this

example of how she memorized the words in this phase is the exception. For all the other

words with the umlauts she told me she just tried to focus on what they looked like and

memorize that visually. However, it seems she did more than just visualize them. She

came up with a pattern for memorizing which words contained an umlaut, over which

letter in the word it was placed, and where that letter was placed in the word: [The

umlaut] is always placed above an a except for fnster. Its always the first [vowel]

except for armbge. Blmrke has two that goes one dot and the two dots, which makes

sense. In the recall phase Catherine correctly recalled all the Swedish words, including

the placement of the umlauts.

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 For the second part of the study Catherine displayed a large range of

memorization strategies. For example, in order to memorize the symbols in slide 3 she

stated she would attempt to identify patterns, such as for example that the black color

moves counter clockwise between the six circles in the symbols in the middle symbols.

For slide 5, she said she would make up a story for each person in the pictures, thus

creating a mental model for each of them. For example, for the little boy on the second

row, Charlie, who she felt looked frazzled, she made a mental model of a boy who

missed his school bus and got in trouble because of it, and then attached the name to the

story. She explained that it helped her to remember the connection between the name and

the picture if she linked them in a story. When I showed her slide 2 (the phone numbers)

she immediately told me those would be very hard for her to memorize, because she was

better at memorizing words than numbers. She suggested she might try to break apart the

prefixes from the rest of the numbers, and group the numbers with the same prefixes

together if she had to memorize these phone numbers, but made no more attempt at

explaining how she would recall the rest of the numbers. For slide 6, she said she would

associate the symbol on the card to an object, and then linked that object to the color of

the card. For example, she associated the symbol on the yellow cards with a sea shell, and

linked that to the color yellow, because the beach where you would typically find a shell

is yellow. Thus, once again, she seemed to create a mental model.

Subject 2, Naomi, did not write anything down during the memorization phase,

but read the words aloud over and over. She made comments on words that sounded alike

rather than on words that looked alike like Catherine had. Naomi read them aloud the

way they would have been pronounced in English, explaining that it would be easier for

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her to remember them that way, but without offering any explanation as to why she

thought so. She was also looking for chunks in the words that she could recognize, and

broke out arm from armbge and blue and mark from blmrke. At the final stage of

memorization she covered over first the column with the English translations and tried to

recall them in a way similar to someone using flashcards where you go back and forth

between question and answer or, in this case, words in different languages. After this she

covered the column with the Swedish words and tried to recall them based on the English

equivalents. She explained that going from the English words to the Swedish words will

be way harder. Its always easier for me to go from the [foreign] language to the English

[language]I can pull random English words out of my head, but not random foreign

words.

Naomi had trouble recalling the word ktenskap (marriage) until she broke off the

part containing kten that she associated with the ancient Egyptian Pharaoh Akhenaten .

She mentioned that if the words had contained affixes she recognized it would have been

easier for her to remember the words because she would have been able to break the

words apart and see a pattern, adding that this was probably just because she was a

linguistics major. At the end of the memorization task she said she did feel as if she had

started to kind of see how Swedish works, because she had come up with a pattern for

Swedish, presumably meaning she had been able to make hypotheses of the underlying

structure of Swedish words. She also explained that to her languages are like math. If

you break it down into its little parts you dont have to focus on meaning so much. She

added that it was probably her training in linguistics that had made her look at languages

in this way.

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 In the next phase of memorization Naomi went over the spelling of each word,

explaining that this would be helpful because it would give [her] something else to focus

on. In this phase, she differentiated between words that were spelled normal, that is to

say those that did not contain any weird vowels (meaning vowels with umlauts) and

those that did. She explained that what was difficult for her was the stuff over the

vowels because we dont do that in English. She added that the accents are what she

finds the hardest in French as well.

One of the hardest words for her to memorize was the word bricka (tray). She

recalled the Swedish word by breaking out the syllable brick- that is the same as an

English word, and add the - a. However, she had trouble associating this with the

meaning of the word in English. Finally, she decided that she would just have to

remember to remember that. Like Catherine, in the recall phase, Naomi correctly

recalled all of the Swedish words with one minor mistake in placing the umlaut.

For the first slide of the additional images she came up with a mental model of a

classroom in which she could place a large number of the objects in the slide. She started

by explaining why certain objects belonged in a classroom, such as the scissors, the

globe, the phone and so forth. In doing this she seemed to rely on her memories of being

in a classroom. For example, she memorized the clock because that was what I would

look at all the time. After placing all the objects she would think of in her mental image

of a classroom she would imagine going outside for recess, playing with a kite, seeing a

butterfly, an airplane and a rainbow in the sky. Thus the strategy she would use for

memorizing these objects was to incorporate the objects in a coherent narrative based

both on her memories of being in a situation where these objects might be found, and by

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incorporating using what appeared to be a script detailing which objects would normally

be found in a classroom.

When she first saw slide 2 Naomi, like Catherine, immediately said that this

memorization task would be impossible for her. However, she did come up with a

memorization technique for retaining the numbers where she broke the prefixes apart

from the rest of the phone number, grouped the numbers with the same prefixes together

and associated the numbers from each group with a specific city with which she was

familiar. She would then add the last digits to the prefixes. She also suggested she might

try to recall the rhythm the numbers make when you repeat them. When I asked her again

after she had come up this memorization technique how easy or difficult she thought it

would be for her to memorize these numbers she stated that she would probably be able

to memorize 90% of them.

One of the first things Naomi mentioned when looking at slide 5 (the pictures

with names) was that what would make it hard to recall the names and connect them with

the pictures was that not all of the people in the pictures had names according to their

ethnicity. For example she said the name Doreen Danisz (second to the left in the top

row) would be hard to recall because she felt the woman in the picture should have an

Asian name. In the case of Rayanna Padmos (bottom left) she stated it would be hard

for her to recall the name because she couldnt determine the ethnicity of the woman in

the picture. The names she said she would have the easiest time recalling were those that

corresponded to a characteristic of the person in the picture. For example, the names

Adele, Al and Emily were names belonging to the same generation as the person in the

picture. She also mentioned she thought she might have more trouble remembering the

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names than the words in the previous memorization task only because Id know that

they were names. She thought that it would be easier to remember the names in

connection with the pictures than without the pictures, because the pictures would be

something to jog your memory. She added that they say that [when taking a test] you

are supposed to chew the same gum that you chewed while you were studying. The same

flavor, because it jogs your memory.

For slide 6, Naomi again attempted to define patterns by identifying the pairs and

the relative positions of the individual cards making up the pair. She felt that this task

would be easy for her, because it all makes sense. Its like geometry. For slide 7 she

tried to see the logic behind the way the words were placed on the page, and their color.

Despite my assurances that the words and their colors were random, she persisted in

attempting to find a pattern among them, and explained if a teacher was to test her on this

there has to be a reason behind it and that she was expected to understand it. Failing

to find that overarching principle, she attempted to make mental models incorporating

some of the words that she broke off as understandable chunks. For instance, she would

imagine a hawk killing a fawn in order to recall those two words (and linked this to her

memory of witnessing an animal kill another). She also made a mental model of a tooth

gnawing at something in order to recall the words tooth and gnaw.

Subject 3, Kerry, had the most explicit and detailed knowledge about how

memorization works of all the subjects. Her started by writing down all of the words on

pieces of scrap paper. Each time she started over she would narrow the list down to only

those words that she was still having trouble with, in a way very similar to how Catherine

would focus only on the flashcards containing the words she had not yet mastered.

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 Kerry used chunking for a few words in order to recall them. For the word

skorsten (chimney), that she initially seemed to find difficult to recall (as I had predicted)

she identified the syllable skor-, which she associated with the English word scorch. In

the same manner, she identified the word ten within the word ktenskap (marriage). She

also associated the second syllable skap with the English word skip and associated that

with skip to the end of the ceremony. She seemed to use these chunks to activate a

script that might help her remember, in this case that of a wedding, where there is a

ceremony involved. In the recall phase, she stated that she memporized these two words

by thinking about someone who got married ten times and who skipped the ceremony.

She also stated that she would imagine some of the other words in her head in what

resembles a mental model in order to remember them. For example, she would picture a

monster in a window to remember the word fnster (window) in a way that would link the

resemblance between the form of the Swedish word fnster and the English word

monster and connect this to its English meaning window. During the discussion after the

recall phase she told me that she had learned in psychology class about different

memorization techniques, and that she had changed the way she goes about memorizing

things based on what she learned in that class. For example, she gave me a very explicit

and coherent explanation of why it was helpful to write the words down:

Interviewer: What is it about writing that is helpful?

Kerry: Cause youre incorporating a lot of stuff: you can see it, alsolikedoing it, and
you can see it in your head. So you have a bunch of different ways to remember it. Like a
lot of differentsensesgoing into it. You think that you are remembering it as you read
it, of course I can remember that word I just read. It is in my short-term memory
nowbut it is not getting connected to anything.

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Thus, she correctly explained the benefits of multisensory learning, by stating that writing

was helpful because that implies both the use of her memory, her vision and the

movement of her hand as opposed to just reading the word. She also showed an

understanding of how memories first go into short-term memory and then needs to be

connected in long-term memory in order to be retained. This corresponds to Ericsson and

Simons (1984) description of the distinction between short-term memory (STM) and

long-term memory (LTM). According to them, whereas STM is easily accessible, has a

small capacity for storage and only can store information for a short period of time, the

LTM on the contrary is slower to access, but has the capacity to store large amounts of

information long term.

In the second memorization task, based on the slides, Kerry almost exclusively

stated that she would base her memorization on memorizing patterns.

Subject 4, Lisa, like the others, relied heavily on trying to discern patterns

between the words and their meanings. Her first approach was to attempt to find

categories within which she could group the words in a way of chunking not previously

displayed by the other subjects in this part of the study, but similar to what they did for

the additional memorization tasks from the slides. In this manner she paired up the

English words for earth and black, difficult and marriage, purple and bruise, car and

bike, chimney and window. However, the limits of this strategy struck her when she

realized she had not yet connected the Swedish words to their English equivalent. At this

point, she abandoned this strategy, and proceeded to just reading the words and

attempting to associate their meaning with the way the words looked. Despite being

prompted, she did not offer a lot of detail regarding the strategies she used for

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memorization, more than saying that her main approach was reading the words over and

over in her head. During the recall state, she relied predominately of perceived

resemblances in terms of sounds, length of the words (for example, she noted that the

words bil and car both contained three letters) and letter combinations between the

Swedish and English words, and in the recall phase she failed to recall words where she

had been able to perceive such resemblances. She explained during the discussion after

the recall phase that she connected the words poison, bottle and tray because she created

a mental model of a bottle containing poison placed on a tray. She failed to remember

three of the words, and did not recall the correct placements of umlauts on any of the

words containing the letters , , or .

When asked to recall the objects of slide 1 she activated what appeared to be an

office or workspace script (although she never stated this explicitly) that incorporated

many of the objects on the screen, such as the chair, the telephone and the computer. She

visualized herself in the mental model she depicted, sitting in the chair, answering the

phone and so forth. For remembering the phone numbers of the second slide, she

suggested after much hesitation that she might attempt to associate parts of the numbers

with dates. For the other slides she stated she would also rely on different types

associations but did not appear confident that they would actually work.

Analysis

The subjects all showed proof of a large degree of awareness of what constitutes

efficient memorization strategy. While all of them were not as explicit about why a

specific strategy was efficient as Kerry, they all showed me that they knew how best to

memorize the vocabulary. They also displayed knowledge of a wide range of different

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learning memory strategies, ranging from simple associations to quite elaborate mental

models. What is even more interesting is that it appeared as if they all had specific

preferences for certain learning strategies over other, and all of them except for Lisa

would follow what appeared to be a rather set checklist of strategies in their mind in a

specific order. They would start by looking for the possibility of making associations of

increasing complexity, then attempting to use strategies based on patterns, chunking and

mental models, and then finally, and only if all else failed, they would default to rote

memorization.

Associations

All of them except for Lisa initially approached the problem by scanning the

words attempting to find associations between the Swedish and English words. What they

would detect first was what Kerry called strong associations, meaning Swedish words

that looked like or were related to the [English] word thus building on the most

apparent similarities between the Swedish and English words. As I predicted, in this first

group of words all of the subjects who used this technique readily identified ko cow,

gatlopp gauntlet. Once they could no longer identify any more such apparent

similarities, they would go on to more elaborate ways of associating Swedish and English

words. In their efforts to associate words they would draw on a large pool of previous

knowledge and experiences, including all of the strategies I predicted before conducting

the study, such as relying on false friends, on knowledge of words in other languages, and

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on homographs across the two languages. Some of the associations were quite simple and

built on, for example, similarities between the form of the two words, such as bil and car

containing the same number of letters, or butelj and bottle both beginning with the same

letter, while others were quite elaborate, such as the association between ktenskap and

Akhnaton. Once they had exhausted the most apparent associations they would attempt to

find more elaborate ways of associating the words with each other. It seemed that the fact

that the associations were strange seemed to help memorization in their opinion.

Indeed, Naomi explained that at this stage she attempted to find weird connections in

order to make it interesting. She thus felt that this would make the words stick easier.

Naomi developed an especially complex way of association for the Chinese characters

and words on slide 4. She looked at the patterns of the characters and noted that some of

them were very similar with only a minimal difference. He would then deduce what part

of the symbol corresponded to which Chinese word. She said without the English

translation that was as far as she would be able to go, but added that had she known the

English translation, she could have added a third step in the association chain, going from

gibberish connected to gibberish (i.e. Chinese characters associated with Chinese

words) to the English translation.

Patterns, Chunking and Mental Models

When the three undersgraduate subjects could no longer find any kinds of

associations they would go on to using either patterns, chunking or mental models, or

sometimes a combination of them. These patterns often built on the students previous

knowledge of relationships between categories or concepts percieved in the world or

learned in other domains. For example, Lisa sorted the words according to their meaning,

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thus connecting earth and black, difficult and marriage, purple and bruise, car and bike,

chimney and window. Naomi used as a basis for her potential recall of the names and

their relationship to the pictures on slide 5 her knowledge of the relationship between

ethnicity and the use of certain names. When she could not determine the ethnicity of one

of the persons on the pictures, or when the ethnicity and the name did not match she

stated she would have more trouble recalling the name.

In their accounts of how they would recall the information on slides 2, 3, 6 and 7,

all of them attempted to discerne a pattern among the symbols or words, sometimes in

connection with association and/or chunking, such as Naomis idea to connect the phone

numbers of slide 2 with cities she knew, or Lisas idea to link them to dates. It was

interesting that Naomi would try to identify patterns even after I stated there were no

patterns to be found, insisting a teacher would not ask her to memorize something that

was not somehow logically connected.

What I also found noteworthy was that all the subjects except for Lisa started by

looking for associations between the spelling of the words, whereas Lisa first paired them

up according to their meaning. However, she did realize fairly quickly that her initial

strategy of finding a pattern of resemblances between the words in terms of meaning was

problematic, and thus abandoned this strategy when she became conscious of the fact that

she would have a problem attaching the Swedish words to the English ones if she

continued using this technique. My hypothesis is that because Lisa is in graduate school

where very little of the school work involves memorization, contrary to what is the case

at the undergraduate level, she has less knowledge of what constitutes a good

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memorization strategy for information of this type because she rarely needs to use such

skills.

The third most common strategy after associations and pattern recognition was

chunking and mental models. Chunking was always connected with association. It

involved breaking out parts of the whole word that they could associate with an English

word, and then attach the rest of the word to the chunk. Examples of chunking from the

material is how Kerry broke out the syllable skor- from skorsten (chimney) and then

associated this syllable to the English word scorched, related both in spelling and

meaning. Another example is how Naomi and Lisa broke off the prefixes from the phone

numbers and associated them with cities and dates.

Another common memorization strategy was the use of mental models. These

would sometimes be in the form of a mental image, such as Lisa imagining poison in a

bottle on a tray in order to connect these three words and then attach their Swedish

equivalent to the objects in this image. At other times the mental image would be

elaborated into a story, such as Naomis narration of how she would be sitting in a

classroom surrounded by the objects on slide 1, and the go out for recess and see some of

the other objects, or her attempts to find a pattern among the words on slide 7 by creating

little stories about a hawk killing a fawn, and a tooth gnawing on something.

Kerry showed proof of a memorization technique combining association,

chunking and a mental model framed as a story in her effort to memorize the word

ktenskap (marriage) and its meaning: In order to remember this word I thought about

the number ten and the word skip. Then I though about someone who got married ten

times and who skipped the ceremony.

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 Rote Memorization

When all else failed the subjects would default to rote memorization, which they often

referred to simply as remembering, or as Naomi put it, to remember to remember. It

was as if they went down the list of possible strategies in their minds and used rote

memorization only as a last resort if they could not come up with another. The subjects

would often comment on the use of this strategy as something they would use when all

else failed, such as for example Catherines comment, when she failed to find a

memorization strategy for the word jord (earth): I am just going to have to remember

that one because I cant think of anything at the moment. Rote memorization was often

connected with attempting to visualize the word.

Conclusion

This memorization task was very hard, because not only did the subjects have to

memorize previously unknown words, some of which contained unknown letters which

they could not pronounce, they also had to go from the English meaning of the words to

the Swedish equivalent, which, as Naomi correctly pointed out, is a lot harder, given that

active recall (coming up with the foreign or unknown word) is harder than passive

recognition (recognizing a foreign word and connecting it with its English equivalent).

I had predicted that because of the level of difficulty of the task the subjects

would not be able to recall more than perhaps half of the Swedish words. However, this

proved to be wrong. Indeed, they were all surprisingly good at recalling the words, and

Lisa, who had the most mistakes in the recall stage still only failed to recall three words

completely. Kerri and Catherine recalled all the words correctly (with the exception of

the placement of one umlaut), and Naomi only made a few mistakes in placing the

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umlauts. In part, my prediction that they would not succeed as well as they actually did

was based on my assumption that they were novices. However, as it turned out, the fact

that they were novices in Swedish did not mean that they could not master the strategies

for memorization. Some of the strategies they used were clearly connected with their

knowledge of vocabulary memorization in other languages, such as the creation of

flashcards, or the method to cover one column and practice the words in the other

column. Other strategies were those that they came up with on the spot, using their

knowledge from other domains, such as categories and patterns. As pointed out by Glaser

and Chi (1988) the ability to recognize familiar patterns is one of the hallmarks of an

expert.

They subjects were quite aware of about which strategies they could put to use,

and which strategies were more efficient than other, but they were not always clear on

precisely why a specific strategy was helpful. For example, one thing that all of them

mentioned was that it was helpful to write down the words, and that repetition helped

them remembering the words, but with the exception of Kerry, they were not quite able to

explain why this was helpful. Kerry did have specific expert-like knowledge thanks to her

previous psychology class in the same manner that Naomi was trained to look for specific

patterns in languages thanks to her specialization in linguistics. However, what is

interesting is the fact that although the subjects were not always clear on why some

strategies were more efficient than others, they clearly based the way they approached the

memorization task on their previous experience of similar tasks and proceeded in an

expert-like fashion.

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 One thing that struck me was how they would sometimes use contextual clues as a

guide for their choice of strategies, in particular connected to the school situation and the

types of knowledge that would be expected in the context. For example, Naomis

insistence that there had to be a pattern among the cards, their colors and symbols on

slide 6, was clearly based on the types of tasks her experience told her a teacher would

ask her to perform. Similarly, Catherine stated that she based her strategy of learning the

words in random order, and by going from English to Swedish because she knew that was

the way I was going to test her on the words.

This study taught me a lot about the different memorization strategies used by

students of foreign languages and of their explicit and implicit understandings of the way

memorization works and what is and isnt an efficient memorization strategy. However,

the one question remaining in my mind is whether or not the subjects would be equally

successful and equally knowledgeable about efficient strategies if I had asked them to

memorize words for a test a week (or month) later. Are they really memorization experts

the way they appeared to be based on this study, or are they simply skilled at a particular

type of memorization, i.e. cramming? In the same manner that I hypothesized that Lisa

was less certain of the most efficient ways to memorize vocabulary than the others

because she currently rarely (if ever) needs to perform this type of tasks, it might be the

case that these students are only familiar with the most efficient way to memorize

vocabulary for immediate recall. If indeed the way they usually go about studying for a

quiz or an exam is by starting to study a short time before the test it would be logical to

think that they are most skilled at this type of short-term memorization. However, in

learning a language and achieving fluency, it is more important to achieve long-term

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memorization of words and their meanings. Therefore, the ability to perform the type of

memorization task I asked the subjects to perform in this study might not be indicative of

their ability to learn foreign vocabulary efficiently for long-term recall. Therefore, in a

future study I would be interested in addressing this problem in order to see if they would

use the same strategies or others, and if they would be as skilled at that type of task as

they proved to be on this one. Only then could I use the results in creating an efficient

way to help foreign language students memorize vocabulary in order to achieve fluency,

which is the goal of the software I am in the process of developing.

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References

Ericsson, K. A., & Simon, H. A. (1984). Protocol analysis: Verbal reports as

data (Chapter 1, pp 1-62). Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press

Glaser, R. and Chi, M. T. H. (1988). Overview. In M. T. H. Chi, R. Glaser and M. J. Farr

(Eds.), The nature of expertise (pp. xv-xxviii). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum

Pannu, J. K., & Kaszniak, A. W. (2005). Metamemory experiments in neurological

populations: A review. Neuropsychology review, 15(3), 105-130.

Reder, L. M.; Ritter, F. E. (1992). "What determines initial feeling of knowing?

Familiarity with question terms, not with the answer". Journal of Experimental
Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition 18 (3): 435

Tulving, E., & Madigan, S.A. (1970). Memory and verbal learning. Annual Review of
Psychology, 21, 437-484

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