Chapter One: Introduction

1. Introduction

Most normal people will learn at least one language without

any difficulties, and that language is called the first language,

our mother tongue. People start learning their first language when

they are born, and feel little stress while learning it. Through a

huge amount of listening and reading as well as speaking and

writing, they gradually build up their knowledge about the language

and its vocabulary, grammar, and pronunciation. Sooner or later,

people come to use the language freely and can say what they want by

the time they get to elementary school.

If a person grows up in bilingual circumstances (that is an

environment where people use more than two languages), he or she can

learn these languages at the same time as the first language and

they all will also become his or her first languages.

However, learning a second language is not so easy. After a

certain age if we decide to learn a foreign language, it is not so

easy to master it and some people even give up learning it. Of

course, if the target language has a lot of similarities to the

learner's first language, the difficulty he or she feels while

1

learning it might not be so serious. On the contrary, if the

distance between the first language and the target language is

great, the learner would feel more serious difficulties. Most

people who have experienced studying foreign languages will know

this because they would have had such feelings. In other words,

people can find how difficult it is to learn a language for the

first time when they try to master a second language.

One of the most difficult points about learning the second

language is building up the vocabulary. We can say that words are

the most basic and important part of learning and using languages.

This is because even if we do not know the grammar of English, we

can communicate with English-speaking people only if we have some

vocabulary knowledge. For example, we can say ‘Sydney tomorrow go I’

and people can get the message even if the grammar is wrong. If we

know the grammar but don't know the words, it must be hard to let

people know our thoughts and feelings. Therefore, learning foreign

(second) language means learning its vocabulary as well as some

important and basic grammar rules.

Most Japanese people start learning a foreign language in

junior high school, and usually the target language is English. The

distance between English and Japanese is very large, so there are a

lot of differences between them. However, they have to study

English in schools, and most of them tend to start learning it by

memorizing words. Learners try various methods to learn words by

writing, listening, and pronouncing them, for example. Regardless

of their hard work, however, their memory of the words easily

2

disappears and it takes a long time until these words really come to

stay in the learners' mind. Research suggests it takes about 8 to

20 meetings with a word before a word stays in the head (Nation,

2001)1 . Thus people have to learn the words again and again if

they want to master them perfectly, and they really do so.

However, it was not until the 19th century that people

experimentally studied the amount of forgetting that takes place

when learning new information. Since then several experiments have

been carried out by scholars such as psychologists and linguists to

look into this important area of memory research. In the next

section we will look at two experiments about memory of language;

one is by Ebbinghaus, and the other was reported by Baddeley.

A. Hermann Ebbinghaus

Ebbinghaus investigated human memory and found we cannot keep

information for a long time naturally. He published his findings in

German as Uber das Gedachtnis (On Memory) in 18852. Ebbinghaus is

considered the pioneer of the experimental study of memory.

Originally, he was interested in mental processes, and from that

research he decided to study memory traces. He focused on how words

were acquired, and on how long they stayed in memory. Actually he

was interested in the cause of forgetting as well, but this theme

was left to the psychologists in the next century. For his

research Ebbinghaus prepared an experiment to clarify the transition

of memory traces. Because he had known the relation between the

word and its meaning, he created over 2,000 nonsense syllables, for

3

the purpose of getting very pure memory traces. That was because

something "meaningful is remembered better"3 and he did not want

the experimental data tainted by other factors such as

meaningfulness. For example, qif, bpd, ngy, xcl, hfm, ckj, fon, cum,

qap, hos, leq, kof, and mec were the some of the syllables he coined

for the experiment. Moreover, because of the heavy memory demands

of this experiment he needed highly motivated subjects to help him

and these subjects should be available over a certain period of

time. Unfortunately, he couldn't find any such subjects, and

Ebbinghaus decided to conduct it with only one subject--himself.

He recorded the time it took him to memorize several “words”,

and analyzed the data by using the savings method (see below). He

prepared two versions of the lists of the syllables (lists A and B)

and learned them at certain intervals, and re-learned them. That

is, he learned each list and recorded how long it took, and after a

certain interval (30 minutes and 48 hours) he learned them again.

Then he checked the number of syllables that stayed in his memory

after every interval.

The learning and relearning times were compared, and so were

the memories after the two rest periods. Ebbinghaus, the subject of

the research, took "4 seconds to learn" list A at first, and 2

seconds to relearn it after a 30-minute rest. List B also took 4

seconds to learn at first while relearning list B after a 48-hour

interval took 3 seconds.

When analyzing the result of the experiment, he used the

4

equation below, and "calculated the amount of savings for each

interval."

(Time for original learning) - (Time for relearning)

Savings =

Time for original learning

Imagine a subject who took 60 minutes to learn words, and who needed

30 minutes to re-learn them 1 day after the original learning. In

this way, the subject saves 30 minutes for learning the words.

Therefore, the subject's savings is 0.5. If, 10 days after the

original learning, the subject took 40 minutes to re-learn the

words, so the savings will be about 0.3. This shows how much a

person can keep the memory of words.

According to his analyses of his own learning, "the savings

after 30 minutes were 50%; savings after 48 hours were 25%." This

result was shown as the famous ‘Forgetting curve’ (see Figure 1).

The retention interval is on the X axis, and the amount saved is on

the Y axis. It was shown by this 'forgetting curve’ that our time

we need to help retention reduces with time. The curve indicates

that forgetting of nonsense syllables is most rapid at the shorter

intervals--between 20 minutes and 24 hours. The decline is much

less rapid after the second day. This implies that more syllables

will be lost most rapidly soon after learning and fewer syllables

will be lost later. This means new memories are very fragile and

soon lost.

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Figure 1: Ebbinghaus's (1885) forgetting curve

B. Alan Baddeley

Another person who studied memory was Alan Baddeley. He is

probably the world’s foremost authority on human memory. He was

interested in how memory worked too, and his study was inspired by

Ebbinghaus's work.

Baddeley reviewed four experiments about memory in his very

famous book Human Memory (1990)4 . In it he said our every day

memory works on many different tasks such as remembering how to

drive a car, play the piano, use language and remember faces, but we

don't think much about our memory on a daily basis. In fact,

however, Baddeley pointedly says "the time at which we are most

aware of our memory is when it fails."5

When we meet a person we know or see a picture of the person,

we can immediately remember his or her name. That is people have

memorized a person by linking his or her name and a face. This fact

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has been shown by testing people's memory of their high-school

classmates6 . The subjects were asked to answer the classmates name

when they saw their pictures, and some despite various ways to trick

them and regardless of the way of answering, the results were clear.

The percentage of correct answers showed a downward curve in

relation to the passage of time. This is another forgetting curve.

Interestingly, when the teacher subjects were shown their students'

pictures, their memory of students' face was lower than the memory

of their names, but the reason of this difference was explained that

teachers had "more individual encounters with the student's name in

connection with tasks such as grading than with the student's face".

In an experiment about the retention of foreign language, the

experimenter investigated how much of the memory of the language

retain in the subjects' mind over 50 years. The result was that

their memories did not so rapidly decay even when they did not use

the language during that period7 .

Another type of memory is the memory which was stored in

people's mind by experiencing something physically or mentally. We

call this 'experimental memory'. This type of memory can be studied

from a behaviorist position, as well. For example, if you want to

play the piano well, you will practice it repeatedly until your

fingers come to move freely on the keyboards. If you drive a car,

you must take enough time to learn how to control the machine as

well as to learn the traffic rules. After a while, you will have

mastered the activity even subconsciously because you have practiced

with part of your body.

One more type of memory Baddeley introduced was

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"autobiographical incidents", which were demonstrated in an

experiment carried out by Linton (1975)8 . The procedure was

similar to Ebbinghaus’s in that she selected a sample of incidents

and events at random and memorized their date and brief description,

and after a certain interval she checked if she could remember the

date and description. The items that were completely forgotten were

dropped from her samples. In contrast to Ebbinghaus she found that

about 5% of the samples were lost per year but in a linear way.

This result was not logarithmic as the Ebbinghaus result would

suggest.

Baddeley studied more about the memory being based on these

experiments and Ebbinghaus's work, and showed something about why we

forget. He explained that time was an important factor for memory

as Ebbinghaus suggested, and he referred to the relationship between

sleep and forgetting and the role of interference. In addition, he

tried to determine the forgetting rate. Baddeley showed that our

memory worked in various ways, so Ebbinghaus's forgetting curve

would not be appropriate for every aspect of memory.

2. The focus of the thesis

From the above we can see that there are still some points to

examine closely. The most important point is that if we are

interested in the working of our memory during learning foreign

languages, there are not many studies about it. Even Ebbinghaus's,

or the studies Baddeley reported, are not able to be said to

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satisfactorily demonstrate the rate of forgetting of new foreign

words.

There are some reasons for this. The first reason is that

although their research is so interesting we can not get enough

knowledge about foreign language learning. Ebbinghaus's study was

too much focused on pure memory. He used nonsense syllables which

he made for his experiment to avoid creating unnaturally high

scores. However, in foreign language learning we cannot separate

the sign, or form and meaning.

In addition, we should be cautious about Ebbinghaus's study

because he examined only one subject, and the only one was

Ebbinghaus himself. The reliability and generalizability of an

experiment would be less if the experimenter and the subject are the

same person. Despite this, he did not collect more objective data

with several subjects.

Another problem is the time his experiment was carried out.

It was in 1885, that is, the result of the experiment, the

forgetting curve, was published about 120 years ago. Therefore it

is long overdue for an update and with a specific reference to

foreign language word learning.

Although, Baddeley's focus is wider, in contrast to

Ebbinghaus, his thoughts about memory involved not only foreign

language but also various daily experiences. Besides, he seemed to

depend on other studies too much, so the basis of his opinions is as

old or inappropriate for second language learning as Ebbinghaus's

forgetting curve.

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Another point to discuss was that the researchers used the

saving method. The results of the experiment shown above in Figure

1 was just shown as the rate, and there were no specific numerical

values to refer to.

Accordingly, we have to carry out an experiment which focuses

on foreign language learning and with numerical values.

3. Research questions

There are two research questions for this experiment, and they

are as follows:

(1) At what rate do people forget words naturally?

(2) Does the time taken to re-learn words decrease the

natural forgetting rate?

In the following chapter we will see the design, the procedure, and

the results of two experiments concerning the memory of foreign

words. In Chapter Three we will discuss these findings.

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Chapter Two: The Studies

1. Introduction

In this chapter, we will conduct two experiments. As we found

in Chapter One, we have to investigate our memory of learning

languages more in detail, although there have been some other

studies already but they did not look at the learning of foreign

languages directly. In regard to each experiment, we will look at

the method first, and the results. Later in Chapter Three, we will

analyze and discuss the data from the experiments.

2. Introduction of the Experiments

There are two experiments. The first experiment is prepared

to verify Ebbinghaus's findings, that is, to verify the rate at

which people forget words naturally. This question is based on

Ebbinghaus's "forgetting curve" study. We replicated his work

focusing on natural forgetting, but with 10 subjects and the target

language was a real language--not a language which was made only for

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this experiment.

The second experiment is based on Pimsleur's work (1967) and

our conviction of the effect of re-learning. By this experiment we

can see the amount of influence that re-learning has in building up

our foreign language vocabulary. Therefore, the research question

seeks to discover if the time taken to re-learn words decreases the

natural forgetting rate over time. In other words, "does re-

learning decrease the time taken to re-learn the words?"

For both these experiments only one kind of test was

prepared, but actually it was designed in order to get some answers

to these two questions. One is how quickly do foreign language

learners forget the new vocabulary, and the other is whether re-

learning strengthens their vocabulary knowledge.

Firstly, we will look at Experiment 1, and later at Experiment

2. The results of the experiments will be discussed in Chapter

Three.

3. Experiment 1

A. Introduction of Experiment 1

Experiment 1 was planned and carried out to verify

Ebbinghaus's "forgetting curve" as he did in 1885. Though this is

based on his study, this experiment was designed to remove some of

12

the disadvantages of the way in which he conducted it. In this

section we will look through the method of Experiment 1, and in the

following section we will see that of Experiment 2.

B. Method

a) Subjects

The subjects were 10 female Japanese-speaking students from 18

to 22 years old and they all belong to the English department of

their college. They had some experiences of learning foreign

languages for some periods but had not learned any Asian language.

Their language proficiency is not important for this study as the

test words were all a new foreign language.

b) Test design

The target language of this experiment was decided to be

Indonesian. There are several reasons why Indonesian was chosen.

Firstly, as this experiment deals with forgetting, it is important

that the subjects do not already know words. Therefore they had to

learn a new language. Moreover, the language had to be a natural

one, not a nonsense one like in Ebbinghaus’s experiment. Secondly,

Indonesian is written in the Roman alphabet with which the subjects

are familiar. Thirdly, as Indonesian is a new language for them,

learning Indonesian would not cause then to lose their motivation to

learn new language in this experiment.

The experimenter had to avoid some things which might

influence the subjects' motivation as much as possible because the

13

learner's motivation is one of the most important points when

learning a foreign language (e.g. Lightbown and Spada, 1999 . 56-

58) .

The test words for the experiment were selected at random

using this procedure. Firstly, some Indonesian words were selected

by using a few internet web sites and dictionaries. Nouns, verbs,

and adjectives were chosen for the test. If the words looked too

hard to learn, for example if they had a long spelling and difficult

meaning, the subjects' motivation might be decreased, so those words

were avoided, as well as loan words. If the loan words already

existed in Japanese (e.g Taksi in Indonesian is taxi in English and

タクシー in Japanese) their appearances might make them too easy to

learn and remember which would lead to little forgetting. In that

case, the result of this experiment would not be so useful.

Therefore, the words were chosen from an Indonesian vocabulary list

at elementary level, and they didn't include loan words.

For this experiment, 20 words were prepared, and this

decision was made considering the subjects' motivation too. If the

1 Nation, P. (2001)

2 Ebbinghaus,H. (1885)

3 Harberlandt K. (1994) 207-209.

4 Baddeley, A. (1990) 234-261.

5 Baddeley, A. Ibid. 233.

6 Bahrick, H., Bahrick, O. and Wittlinger, R. (1975)

7 Bahrick, H. (1984)

8 Linton, M. (1975)

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subjects saw a list of 30 words and were soon asked to learn them

perfectly, they would feel that the task was impossible and this

feeling might decrease their motivation. However, if there were

only 10, small number of words would not show a clear difference

statistically. Thus, it seemed that 20 words were the most suitable

for this experiment.

After collecting the test items, the type of the test was

selected. The experimenter selected a productive style of test,

that is, the Indonesian words are written on the test paper in

advance and the subject will write their meanings in Japanese (See

Appendix 1). If the test was matching style, the subjects could

easily choose the correct item even if they actually could not

understand the Indonesian word, because they could see the meanings

on the paper. This would not be good because the score of the test

would be very high and would involve prompted recall. Moreover, if

the subjects had to write down the correct Indonesian words

equivalent to the Japanese, they would feel much more pressure when

they memorize the words, and it might affect their motivation.

The subjects did not have a chance to ask about this

experiment until they finished the chain of tests, and the

researcher of course did not explain about it and just only gave

them some directions when they were taking the tests.

c) Pilot study

After deciding the test words and the test style, the

researcher conducted a pilot test to check whether the test really

worked well or not. The pilot test was carried out with 4 students

15

who were not the subjects of the main experiments. So as not to

make them feel pressure, the directions were given in Japanese, but

never explained the details of this experiment. However, after

taking the test, they said they gradually lost their motivation

while they were memorizing the words, although care was taken in

selecting them. The students complained that some of the words were

very unfamiliar in structure, so they could not imagine their

pronunciation, and that annoyed them. In fact, the time they needed

to learn the 20 test words was much longer than expected.

Therefore, the words had to be chosen again. This time the words

were selected not only considering of the length of the spelling and

of the origin, but also the phonetic structure of the words. For the

main experiments, the experimenter chose 20 Indonesian words which

had consonant-vowel structure, which is the same structure as

Japanese words, and which would lessen the difficulty of learning

them. The words were piloted again to verify that the new 20 words

work well. The 20 test words are shown in Table 1.

Table 1: The test words

Indonesian meaning Indonesian meaning

1 bangun

to get up( 起 き

る)

1

1 kuda horse( 馬)

2 bunga flower( 花)

1

2 lalu to go through(通る)

3 cuci to wash( 洗う)

1

3 maju

to make progress( 進

む)

16

4 guru teacher( 先生)

1

4 makan to eat( 食べる)

5 hujan rain( 雨)

1

5 mata eye(目)

6 ibu mother( 母)

1

6 matahari sun(太陽)

7 ikan fish( 魚)

1

7 pisau knife( ナイフ)

8 kaki foot( 足)

1

8 ramai lively( 賑やかな)

9 kemarin yesterday( 昨日)

1

9 sepatu shoe( 靴)

10 kiri left( 左)

2

0 utara north( 北)

d) Procedure

The whole procedure of the experiment was decided. The two

most important things to carry out the experiment were not to

decrease the subjects' motivation and to get the natural forgetting

rate. Thus the all instructions were given in Japanese. Before

starting the experiment, the researcher told the subjects that she

would not answer the questions about the experiment and she could

not explain about it too until after all the tests had been

completed. Also, the subjects were asked not to speak about this

experiment even with the other subjects and to try not to write down

and remember the words.

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The researcher timed every subject for each task. In total

eight versions of the test were taken by the subjects in Experiment

1. On the first day of the experiment, the subjects were shown a

list of 20 Indonesian words, and were asked to memorize them in any

way they liked. The subjects could learn them by writing,

pronouncing, or using cards which were given with the word list.

Indonesian was written on one side of the card, and Japanese was on

the other side. When the subjects felt they got 20 words perfectly,

they took TEST 0 (see Appendix 1) to check their memory. The

subjects had 3 minutes to answer the test. If the score on TEST 0

was 20, they could go to the next step, but if not, they had to

learn the words again until they really got 20 points on TEST 0.

Experiment 1 was designed to show how much memory would be lost as

time passed, so in order to show this, the memory had to be maximum

or the forgetting curve would have no baseline data of 20 words

learned from which decay could be measured. The subjects could not

check the word list and cards again. If they could not get 20

points, they were just given the word list and cards again, and had

soon to start learning again until they got a perfect score.

When a subject could get 20 points on TEST 0, they were handed

a distraction exercise. The subjects were directed to solve maths

questions as quickly as possible for 5 minutes (See Appendix 2).

This was just a distraction to remove the subjects' attention from

the test words, so how quickly they could calculate had nothing to

do with the experiment. The subjects of course did not know this

fact.

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After a 5 minute distraction, the subjects had to take the

next test which was the first of the ‘forgetting rate tests’. TEST

I had the same questions as TEST 0 but were printed in a different

order to remove any learning or memory effect from serial

positioning, and all the subsequent tests differed only by changing

the order of test items. From this test the natural forgetting of

words were recorded, and the subjects were given 3 minutes answering

time.

There was a gap of one hour before the next test. The subjects

had to spend the time doing a distracting exercise by drawing

pictures, being interviewed on the test, or chatting with the

researcher.

After passing TEST 0, and the distraction was finished, the

subjects had to take another version of the test which again showed

the same words in a new order. The answering time was 3 minutes as

well.

The next test was carried out on the following day, that is,

24 hours after learning the words. TEST IV was carried out 1 week

later from the first day of the experiment, and after this test to

TEST VII the test was carried out every week for 4 weeks. Of course

the subjects had no chance to learn or see the words again. Thus in

Experiment 1 the subjects took 8 memory tests over a 4 week period.

The procedure is summarized in Table 2.

Table 2: Summary of tests for Experiment 1

Step Subjects were to... Time Passage

19

1

 

 

 

 

 

1) be given a list of 20 words and the cards

2) Learn the 20 words

3) take TEST 0 many times till they get 20 points

4) have 5 minute distraction

5) take TEST I

6) have 1 hour distraction

7) take TEST II

0

plus 5 min.

plus 1 hour

2 1) take TEST III plus 1 day

3 1) take TEST IV plus 1 week

4 1) take TEST V plus 2 weeks

5 1) take TEST VI plus 3 weeks

6 1) take TEST VII plus 4 weeks

e) Results

The results by subject of Experiment 1 are shown in Table 3

and Figure 2. They show the mean scores for the tests over time.

The graphical data by subjects is in Appendix 3. The subjects took

an average of 23.1 (s.d. 5.99) minutes to learn the 20 words

perfectly.

The results show mean score of 20 points for TEST 0 dropping

gradually to 16.4 over 4 weeks. These results will be discussed in

Chapter Three.

Table 3: Results by subject for Experiment 1 (Max = 20)

Subjects

Learning

Times Scores

20

   

  5 min.

1

hour 1 day

1

week

2

weeks

3

weeks

4

weeks

Test

0 Test Ⅰ

Test

Ⅱ Test Ⅲ

Test

Ⅳ Test Ⅴ

Test

Ⅵ

Test

Ⅶ

1 14 20 20 20 20 20 19 20 19

2 18 20 20 19 19 17 19 20 18

3 19 20 20 19 20 13 12 13 14

4 30 20 20 20 20 20 18 17 20

5 18 20 16 19 20 20 18 18 18

6 21 20 20 20 19 20 20 20 20

7 24 20 19 18 18 19 20 17 13

8 28 20 19 20 18 14 10 11 10

9 27 20 20 20 20 18 16 17 18

10 32 20 20 20 18 14 12 13 14

mean 23.1 20 19.4 19.5 19.2 17.5 16.4 16.6 16.4

s.d. 5.99 0 1.26 0.71 0.92 2.84 3.72 3.24 3.41

Figure 2: Forgetting curve of mean scores for the 20 words

21

in Experiment 1 (n=10)

On average, the subjects remembered 16 of the 20 words over 4

weeks.

4. Experiment 2

A. Introduction of Experiment 2

Experiment 1 was carried out to see how many words were lost

over time. In this section we will look at Experiment 2.

This experiment is identical to Experiment 1 in many ways

except that it shows us whether relearning effects our memory or

22

not. As mentioned in the beginning of this chapter, Experiment 1

and 2 were carried out with the same tests but there was a

difference in the procedure.

B. Method

a) Subjects

For Experiment 2 there were also 10 Japanese female college

students belonging to English department, but they were not the

subjects of Experiment 1. All these subjects had also learned

foreign languages before.

b) Test design

The test words were the same as Experiment 1, and so was the

test procedure. Also, there were 8 versions of the same tests, and

the answering time was also 3 minutes.

c) Procedure

Basically the procedure of Experiment 2 was same as that of

Experiment 1. The only difference between Experiment 1 and 2 was

that in Experiment 2 the subjects were able to re-learn the words

list for a fixed time after they had taken their timed test.

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Table 4: Summary of tests for Experiment 2

On the first day of the experiment, the subjects of

Experiment 2 took tests following the same procedure as for

Experiment 1. However, on the second day of the experiment, they

were given the next memory test but then permitted to re-learn the

words until they felt they could remember them all perfectly. It is

important to note that the re-learning time was taken for the

subjects of Experiment 2 after taking their tests. This was done to

see if less time was taken to learn the words after each meeting.

The assumption was that if the re-learning times reduced, the words

were becoming more and more well-learned.

24

Step Subjects were to... Time Passage1      

1) be given a list of 20 words and the cards2) Learn the 20 words3) take TEST 0 many times until they get 20 points4) have 5 minute distraction5) take TEST I6) have 1 hour distraction7) take TEST II

0 

plus 5 min. 

plus 1 hour2   

1) take Test III2) be given the list and the cards to Re-Learn3) have 5 minutes distraction4) take TEST 0

plus 1 day   

3   

1) take TEST IV2) be given the list and the cards to Re-Learn3) have 5 minutes distraction4) take TEST 0

plus 1 week   

4   

1) take TEST V2) be given the list and the cards to Re-Learn3) have 5 minutes distraction4) take TEST 0

plus 2 weeks   

5   

1) take TEST VI2) be given the list and the cards to Re-Learn3) have 5 minutes distraction4) take TEST 0

plus 3 weeks   

6   

1) take TEST VII2) be given the list and the cards to Re-Learn3) have 5 minutes distraction4) take TEST 0

plus 4 weeks   

At each subsequent time interval the subjects were first given

their normal test, then were allowed to relearn their words and take

TEST 0 again at the end of 4 weeks. In this way it was confirmed

that the subjects had relearned the words perfectly. At each

subsequent test time, the time taken to relearn the words was then

measured to see if re-learning made a difference to the relearning

times. The same 5-minute distracting time was used as in Experiment

1. The subjects took a total of 13 tests during the experimental

period. The procedure is shown in Table 4.

d) Results

The learning times and the scores of Experiment 2 are shown in

Table 5, and Figure 3 shows the mean scores for the tests over time.

Table 5: Test scores by subject in Experiment 2

In Appendix 4 the graphical data by subject is also shown. The

subjects took a mean 28.8 (s.d. 4.47) minutes to learn the 20 words.

The data show that the mean score averaged 20 as one would expect

25

Times      5 min 1 H 1 day 1 week 2 weeks 3 weeks 4 weeks

   Test 0

Test Ⅰ

Test Ⅱ

Test Ⅲ

Test 0

Test Ⅳ

Test 0

Test Ⅴ

Test 0

Test Ⅵ

Test 0

Test Ⅶ

Test 0

1 23 20 19 20 20 20 20 19 19 20 20 20 20 202 34 20 20 19 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 203 23 20 19 20 20 20 18 20 20 20 18 20 20 204 31 20 20 18 16 19 18 19 19 20 19 20 20 195 26 20 20 19 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 206 27 20 20 19 20 19 19 19 20 20 20 20 20 207 34 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 19 208 33 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 209 25 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 2010 32 20 20 20 18 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20Mean 28.8 20 19.819.519.419.8 19.5 19.7 19.8 20 19.7 20 19.919.9s.d. 4.47 0 0.420.711.350.42 0.85 0.48 0.42 0 0.67 0 0.320.32

Subject Learning SCORES

because they met the words several times.

Figure 3: Forgetting curve of mean scores for the 20 words

in Experiment 2(n=10)

Table 6: Re-learning times needed

Subject Re-Learning Times Needed

 

Plus 1 day

(after Test Ⅲ)

Plus 1 week

(after Test Ⅳ)

Plus 2 weeks

(after Test Ⅴ)

Plus 3 weeks

(after Test Ⅵ)

Plus 4 weeks

(after Test

Ⅶ) 

1 2 2 3 1 0.5

2 3 2 2 1 1

3 6 3 2.5 2 1.5

26

4 6 2 2 2 1.5

5 3 2 3 1.5 1

6 3 2 1.5 1 1

7 3 2 1 1 1

8 4 2 3 0.5 0.5

9 3 2 2 1 1

10 3 3 2 1 0.5

Mean 3.6 2.2 2.2 1.2 0.95

s.d. 1.35 0.42 0.67 0.48 0.37

The re-learning times for the 10 subjects in Experiment 2 are shown

in Table 6 and Appendix 5.

Below in Figure 4, the mean re-learning times are shown.

These data show a mean decrease in re-learning times from Test 3 (1

day after the baseline TEST O) of 3.6 minutes (s.d. 1.35) to 0.95

minutes (0.37) after 4 weeks.

Figure 4: Mean Re-learning times between tests by the subjects

for Experiment 2

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5. Summary

In this chapter we have seen the method and the results of two

experiments. In the next chapter, we will look at the data, and

discuss the findings of these experiments more in detail to find

answers to the two research questions posed in Chapter One.

Pimsleur, P. (1967) 73-75.

Lightbown, P. and Spada, N. (1999) 56-58.

Waring, R. (1997) 94-114.

28

Chapter Three: Analysis and Discussion

1. Introduction

The two experiments were designed and carried out as we have

seen in the former chapter. In this chapter, we will look at the

result of each experiment and discuss the findings in more detail.

2. Results of Experiment 1

A. Summary of Experiment 1

We carried out this experiment to look for the answer to the

question of how quickly second (foreign) language learners forget

words learned from word cards. The aim was to replicate Ebbinghaus's

experiment.

The subjects were asked to learn 20 Indonesian words without

being informed of the aim of the experiment. They were timed for

their memorization of the words, and the follow-up tests recorded

how much they forget during the experimental period. First, they

29

had to memorize the words perfectly, and after that they had to take

several tests at certain time intervals.

B. Findings

The aim of Experiment 1 was to verify the validity of the

forgetting curve, and the results are shown in Table 3, Figure 2,

And Appendix 3 in Chapter Two.

Compared to Ebbinghaus's experiment, this study had more

subjects than his, and the most important point was that the target

of this experiment was a real language though in his experiment the

target was man-made non-sense syllables. However, the intervals

were decided differently, and the total period for the experiment

was also different.

Basically, the result of the experiment showed a similar

decline to Ebbinghaus's curve, but it was not so steep. There is

great individual variation in the amount of forgetting, although the

scores generally gradually decreased (See Figure 5).

Figure 5: Mean Scores of Experiment 1

30

Some of the subjects forget words in a similar way to Ebbinghaus's

forgetting curve, but a few subjects did not--they even retained

most of the words over the 4 weeks. For example, Subjects 1 and 2

learned 20 words very quickly but did not forget many of them. On

the contrary, Subjects 8 and 10 forget most of the words although

they took much longer to learn the words initially. However, it is

clear that natural forgetting progresses in proportion to the time

passage when we look at Appendix 3 in Chapter Two.

3. Results of Experiment 2

A. Summary of Experiment 2

The design of this experiment was the same as that of

Experiment 1. The only difference was that the subjects could re-

learn the list of words after taking each test, after which they

rested for 5 minutes as a distraction, and then took the test again

to check the effect of the re-learning.

B. Findings

In Experiment 2, there are also individual differences in

learning times and in the scores of the tests similar to those in

Experiment 1.

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Thanks to the re-learning, they seldom forgot words, and could

keep higher scores throughout the experimental period. Moreover,

the mean scores of Experiment 2 gradually improved not only the

score after re-learning but also before (See Figure 6).

Because of the re-learning, the scores are naturally higher

than those of Experiment 1. When we compare the scores of before and

after re-learning, the latter is higher than the former. That is,

the change of the scores shows us the effect of re-learning. We can

find this in Table 5, Figure 3, and Appendix 4 in Chapter Two and

Figure 6 below.

Figure 6: Mean scores of Experiment 2

Interestingly, the time they required for relearning reduced

as we can see in Table 6, Figure 4, and Appendix 5 in Chapter Two.

Therefore, we can see the importance of relearning when learning

word cards to study the vocabulary of the foreign language.

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4. Comment

When the subjects finished taking the series of tests, the

researcher interviewed them about how they had learned the 20 words.

Prior to the experiment, all of them had no knowledge of Indonesian.

Most subjects said they learned the words by writing the spelling,

and few of them by just looking at them or pronouncing them.

Writing words in order to learn them required people to use their

eyes and hands, and to move them. This monitor-manual movement

might have stimulated their memory, and help them to memorize the

words.

However, according to the subjects of Experiment 1, the memory

which had been made by physical movement did not last long in their

mind. The subjects who used this way gradually forgot the words in

line with Ebbinghaus's forgetting curve. Therefore, we cannot

conclude that writing down the word pair is the most effective way

to prevent forgetting.

Yet the subjects who showed high scores in the chain of tests

said they learned the words by connecting them with another image,

in other words, by creating mnemonics. In other words, they

memorized by drawing a mental picture of the word, or when they

connected the new word to a word in their first language that had

similar pronunciation, and connect the word and the image. This

does not always require a learner to part of their body. However,

33

people who learned the words in this way could keep the memory for a

long time. This implies that mnemonics are very successful for this

type of learning. (See Ellis, N. for a review.)

This fact would encourage people who are learning foreign

languages and who are teaching languages. As we know, learning a

foreign language involves learning its vocabulary, so the finding of

an efficient way of vocabulary building would help the acquisition

of the language.

Compared with Ebbinghaus's "forgetting curve", the curve we

could get by this experiments were not so steep. There are several

possible reasons for this.

Firstly, it might be caused by the difference of the design of

the experiment. Ebbinghaus created a huge number of nonsense

syllables as the target to learn, but for this experiment 20 words

of a real language were used. People are accustomed more to the

real words than to non-sense syllables, therefore, the subjects of

these experiments may have been able to learn and keep them more

easily.

Secondly, the difference of the experimental method might be a

part of the reason. The subjects of this experiments used the word

cards to learn the words, unlike Ebbinghaus. Using such cards to

learn new words can aid memorization of them, because it involves

testing your memory with the cards by yourself. The effect of

studying with word cards was shown by Waring in 1997 .

Another reason is that the subjects of these experiments all

had learned foreign languages. Owing to the experiences of learning

a second language they might have special techniques to learn new

34

words and store them in their memory for a long time, and this may

have benefited their retention of the words. If the subjects had

never learned foreign language before, the direction itself by the

researcher might have confused the subjects. In that case, the

results of these experiments would be changed.

One more possible reason is the difference of the behavior of

the requirement of learning in the experiment. Ebbinghaus and other

scholars did not pressure the subjects in this way and they

collected the data which the subjects learned without pressure . In

this experiment, however, the researcher pressured the subjects to

memorize the words perfectly initially. This was to create a base

knowledge from which the learners’ vocabulary could be measured for

decay. This procedure might influence the subjects mentally, as it

requires them to work harder than if they had not been directed to

do so, so strictly. Thus the pressure of the test seems important

for the language learners and may have helped them to retain the

words to some extent.

5. Weak points of the Experiments

There are several weak points of this study that we must be

aware of.

Firstly, the number of the subjects was quite small. If more

subjects had been tested, the experiment could lead to greater

reliability. Also, having more subjects could clarify not only the

35

tendencies and the characteristics but also the exceptions.

Secondly, our subjects had similar backgrounds. In this

experiment the subjects were all female college students, and their

first language was only Japanese.

Thirdly, the target language was Indonesian, and it was

limited only to elementary level words. Thus, the test words could

not be selected from various types.

In addition, the strict requirement to get the base knowledge

level seemed to have influenced the subjects. If we wish to measure

more natural forgetting, future researcher might be better if there

were less pressure.

6. Further research

As we looked at the experiment and its results, we could find

the answers to the first two questions. Ebbinghaus's forgetting

curve could be applied to foreign language learning, but the speed

and the amount of forgetting depends on the individual's memory.

Therefore, we need to examine more subjects to get a better, more

universal, forgetting curve.

If we could find such a forgetting curve, we would be able to

devise teaching methodologies to prevent our vocabulary from

decaying, which would certainly help our second language learning.

For that, we have to conduct this research again with many more

subjects who have various backgrounds and compare those results with

36

these. For example, there is a need to compare young children's

memory, adults’, and older people's; males’ and females’; and

Chinese-speaking people's and French-speaking people's learning of

English. Besides this, other languages would need to be

investigated. If there is a difference between languages for

forgetting rates, we might be able to rank languages from the point

of view of which language is easier or harder to master as a foreign

language.

7.Conclusion

In this thesis, we carried out two experiments for the purpose

of getting answers to two research questions. The first was the

rate at which people forget words naturally, and the other was to

examine if the time taken to re-learn words decreases the natural

forgetting rate. These questions are interesting for foreign

language learners and their teachers because the answers to these

question would be useful for their language learning.

When we started the experiments, we focused on vocabulary

because we thought vocabulary building was one of the most basic and

important aspects of learning a foreign language. According to

Experiment 1, we found that the forgetting curve was not as steep as

Ebbinghaus’s, possibly because of the pressure the subjects faced

when having to learn the words initially. This requirement for

perfect initial knowledge may have aided their retention. Secondly,

there was a big difference between the time each subject needed to

37

learn words, and the rate of forgetting differed clearly by

individuals. Also, we could find there was a good way to build up

vocabulary effectively, that is learning words by connecting certain

images or the word of the first language which has similar

pronunciation. In addition to this, Experiment 2 showed that re-

learning could prevent the learner from forgetting the words

naturally. Thus we are now getting a clearer picture of an

effective way to learn foreign words when using word cards.

We cannot say that we could find the best way of learning

words, so more experiments varying the test design, the subjects,

and the testing period and so on need to be carried out. When the

various studies are carried out, we may then discover an efficient

way of learning bilingual word pairs.

Beaton, A., Gruneberg, M., and Ellis, N. (1995) 112-120.

Waring, R. (1997) 94-114.

Atkinson, R. and Shiffrin, R. (1968) 89-195.

38