The whole thesis consists of four parts。 Part one presents a brief introduction。 Part two is a literature review, which has a brief review about Ebbinghaus Forgetting Curve and the primary English learning。 Part three gives a representation of the teaching material contents and introduce meaningful memory methods。 The last part draws a conclusion。 This thesis is aimed to analyze the memorizing and forgetting process of primary school students according to Ebbinghaus Forgetting Curve so as to improve the quality and efficiency of English learning。
1。 Literature Review
2。1。 Brief introduction about Ebbinghaus Forgetting Curve
According to the study of Ebbinghaus, the curve directly manifests the most important forgetting rules: the forgetting process isn’t an equilibrium。 At first, after 1 or 2 days, people will forget most of what they have just memorized the most quickly and then about 4 or 5 days later, they will forget the contents slowly and less。 After a long time, after about 10 days, they will forget little。 On the whole, the process of forgetting is much quicker before it gets slow (Lynch, B。K。 2011)。 Generally speaking, people will forget the most at first, so people will keep what they have memorized deeply in mind if they keep repeating them quickly and continuously after the interval of 5 minutes, 30 minutes, 12h, 1day, 2days, 4days and etc。Besides the intervals, there are also many other important factors contributing to forgetting such as the learning contents。 The learning contents which are less important, less interesting and less meaningful will be forgotten more quickly and easily by primary school students。 In contrast, contents which students are more familiar with and more interested in are harder to be forgotten。
2。2 。 Review on Primary School Student’s English Learning
Primary school English education is an enlightenment to students, laying a solid foundation to their English learning in their lifetime, whose importance is evident。 However, at present, there are several serious problems。
Firstly, the spelling of English words is a great challenge for many primary school students。 They learnt Chinese pinyin when they were very young, therefore, at first, they would easily mix them with English words。 For example, when primary school students spell the word ‘duck’, they would possibly delete ‘c’ and mix it with ‘duk’, because in English, there are more consonants (Ellis, R。 2009: 12) while in Chinese pinyin there are much fewer, so students would easily mix them。 In this condition, students with no memory skills have no choice but to memorize the words mechanically with great efforts。 Therefore, English learning becomes a great challenge and difficulty to them。文献综述
Secondly, effective vocabulary teaching is not only a precondition but also a promise in the whole English learning, which is of great significance。 However, in the traditional vocabulary lessons, the teaching method is fixed, inefficient and unscientific, which seriously contributes to a low-efficient English learning。 In the traditional vocabulary lessons, the teacher teaches students mechanically following the glossary in the book。 The teacher reads the words in turn from the first one to the last one and then the students just repeat the words mechanically and constantly after him。 After students are able to read, which means the teacher has finished his task and students quickly begin to read by themselves to recite the words。 If students can recite the words and write them correctly which means they have mastered these words。 However, in fact, this memory method is of low efficiency and leads to several disadvantages as follows:
Firstly, the students just continuously chant and repeat after the teacher without thinking in mind at all, so with no language contexts they would forget the words easily especially for primary school students who have less patience and would easily feel bored。 Sometimes they could even mix the words with meanings of other words。 艾宾浩斯遗忘曲线在小学英语教学中的应用研究(2):http://www.youerw.com/yingyu/lunwen_85063.html