Pardon My French!

Today I read and learned about Cognitive Load, and one of the concepts behind this theory is that the working memory is capable of handling a certain number of items at one time. And that magic number, it turns out, is about seven. Hence, phone numbers are of this length to provide the maximum number of phone numbers but still be capable of retained in memory (though, truth be told, with cell phones today most everyone would be lost in the dark of important numbers if they were to lose their phone, as these no longer have to be dialed but simply summoned through a contacts list. Yikes! It occurs to me that I can recall rotory dial phones and how frustrating it was to misdial a number if it were the sixth or seventh number. I'm getting old, I guess!). Anyway, one lesson I teach my students in English underscores the importance of visualization and background knowledge. I provide students with two passages -- one in English about Australian cricket, the other in French about the geography of mountains and rivers in France (see pictures below). Naturally, one would expect to comprehend and retain the passage written in English. However, since the passage is about cricket, with which most students are totally unfamiliar, students tend to have extremely poor comprehension and recall of the text. The French text is accompanied with an illustration and, while written in French, enough of the nouns are Latinate to make them resemble the English ones and, combined with the illustration, the students' comprehension surpasses that of the passage about cricket. Seems schema and illustrations do matter with comprehension, retention, and learning. Something to think about -- Penzez vous!