2 Information Encoding in Vocabulary Learning

Cognitive psychologists believe that whatever is going to be remained has to go through the operations of three processes: information encoding, information storage and information retrieval。 All of the three operations are essential for vocabulary learning and memory。 Encoding is the process how we transfer the external stimulates into our internal world, or mental world。 In this section I will introduce the vocabulary learning strategies on information encoding。

2。1 Chunking

We process information in short-term memory which is also called working memory。 “It is the interface where new information is held temporarily and combined with knowledge from long-term memory to solve problems。”(Anita Woolfolk, 2012:203)。 We receive a lot of information in the external world but only a small part of them are available。 The capacity of the short-term memory is limited。 According to George Miller (1956), we can only hold 5 to 9 (7+2)items once in our short-term memory。 To some extent, chunking can be used to circumvent the limited capacity of short-term memory。 A chunk is a meaningful unit of information。 Widdowson (1989) proposed that, when learning a second language, it is more important to learn chunks than grammar。 Liu Guoqing (2011: 21) believes that the reason why native English speakers can express themselves fluently is because they have kept a wide range of chunks in their memory。来`自+优-尔^论:文,网www.chuibin.com +QQ752018766-

Chunking is the process of combining several items into a larger and meaningful unit, or chunk。 For example, there are a list of letters: CATCNDUCKUSADOVEUK。 If we view these letters are unrelated letters, then in our eyes there are 18 letters, and we may feel it difficult to remember all of them within a few seconds。 However, if we view them as several meaningful units, that is, CAT, CN, DUCK, USA, DOVE, UK, it’s easy to remember them all。 This is the chunking process。 After chunking, the memory load reduced from 18 to six, and we know CAT, DUCK, DOVE are three kinds of animals while CN, USA, UK are three nations。 When we learn a new word, such as “dispassionate”, if we remember it letter by letter, we have to remember 13 letters which is more beyond our short-term memory capacity (7+2)。 And it's not so easy for our brain to handle it。 If we chunk this letters as dis passion ate, our cognitive load are reduced to 3。 In other words, we have increased the capacity of short-term memory capacity by chunking。 Unfortunately, instead of chunk by chunk, many Chinese students remember English words letter by letter。 Since Chinese English learners are accustomed to repeat inpidual letters mechanically, they are advised to pay attention to chunks in English words rather than separate letters。