Use cognitive load theory to improve your (ESL) teaching
Chris ParkerWhen teaching ESL, every teacher wants their students to learn English quickly, so it makes sense when new teachers try to provide their students with as much information as possible during lessons. However, regardless of how ambitious you are as a teacher, your students can only remember so much of what you teach them. One way to get around this obstacle is to use cognitive load theory to your advantage. By presenting information in strategic ways, you can make life easier for both your students and yourself.
What is cognitive load theory?
Cognitive load theory (CLT) is based on the concept that your students have two different cognitive functions: one that processes new information, which is called working memory, and one that stores information as long-term memory. The brain can only process so much information at once between these two functions, and new information can be lost and not stored in memory if the brain is overloaded and processing too many things at once.
Working memory vs. long-term memory
Working memory – this is short-term memory where your students briefly remember information they’ve just learned minutes before but haven’t yet stored that information as long-term memories to recall it later.
Long-term memory – this contains the information that your students can remember long after a lesson, even days, weeks, months, or years down the line. The brain has organized this information, which allows your students to store it for longer periods.
The brain can only take in as much as the seat can endure
W.S.Churchill
How can CLT help me as a teacher?
CLT argues that your students have a limited amount of working memory (short-term memory) available and a limited capacity to store long-term memory as well. Using this theory, you can change how you present your information to your students so that they don’t experience cognitive overload, which is when their brain stops storing information because it’s overloaded with too much already.
CLT can be used to help your students use both their working memory and long-term memory more efficiently. This means that you’ll be spending less time repeating things and wondering why your students aren’t remembering what you’ve taught them and more time moving on to the next topic, as your students can learn and remember new concepts more easily and quickly.
What are the benefits of reducing cognitive load?
Reducing your students’ cognitive load can help in the following ways:
- Improves memorization of new concepts
- Enhances comprehension of information
- Maintains student interest in new topics
- English taught is acquired more quickly
- Makes your job as a teacher much easier
Using schemata to reduce cognitive load
When your students receive new information, they use schemata to then convert that new information into long-term memory. Schemata are the different ways that the brain organizes information, which makes it easier for it to be recalled later. This also helps to reduce cognitive load, as your students don’t have to think as hard about something to remember it.
An example of this would be if you were to store and recall the word “toad” by remembering that it rhymes with a word you already know, such as “road.” Another example would be how your brain might remember the word “blue” by associating it with the sky or water and thinking about these things when trying to recall the word.
Strategies to reduce cognitive load
As an ESL teacher, you can use the following strategies to reduce your students’ cognitive load:
Use chunking to present new information
Chunking is taking bits of new information and putting them into groups so they’re easier to remember. Think of these groups as categories, which helps to break down information into smaller bits while creating associations between words.
An example of this would be if you were teaching your students about modes of transportation, and instead of simply naming different modes, which can be difficult to remember, you group them based on their characteristics.
You would group land modes (e.g. cars, trains, etc.) by presenting them first and purposely telling your students that they all use land. You would then present modes that use the air in a group (e.g. airplanes, helicopters, etc.), and then aquatic modes (e.g. boats, submarines, etc.).
Research shows that chunking helps students retain and recall new information more easily, though it also shows that learners can only recall about three to five chunks at a time, and knowing this can help you predict student mistakes if you know that they’ll have to recall more than three to five groups at a time.
Tip: use broader categories as chunks
You should therefore consider chunking all information you present to your students and plan your lessons out to include only three to five chunks. If you have a lot of information to cover that won’t fit in three to five chunks, you should consider using larger chunks instead.
Categorize the information into larger, broader categories if you need to, and always remember to explain to students why each word or concept falls into a specific category (e.g. “The car goes in the land category because it has wheels.”)
Activate prior knowledge
Students learn better when they can use what they already know as support to better comprehend new concepts. Long-term knowledge of information, also known as prior knowledge, lasts longer than the type of short-term knowledge that’s stored temporarily in working memory.
You’ll therefore want your students to activate and use this as much as possible, and the best way for you as a teacher to do this is to build associations between new information and older, stored information.
You should think about what your students already know, whether it’s something you’ve taught them in a previous lesson or something they’ve learned in their everyday life. A simple example of this would be if you were to carry out a discussion about a previous topic and then use similarities between that topic and a new one to introduce the new one.
Benefits of activating prior knowledge
Activating prior knowledge offers two main benefits:
Helps build associations
Schemata help your students remember and recall information, and by building associations between what students know and what they’re currently learning, you’re giving them a framework that they can use to build schemata (e.g. recalling something more easily by thinking about something associated with it.)
Reduces cognitive load
The cognitive load of having to remember new information can be lightened by making it easier for the brain to retrieve that information. Prior knowledge is easier for your students to recall than new information. Once stored information is associated with new information, your students will expend less cognitive energy trying to remember the new information.
Use imaginative activities
To strengthen long-term memory, you should teach your students to remember things using schemata in their brains rather than simply relying on visual, auditory, or other associations. Students learn in different ways and things like text, audio, and video can all help support that learning in the beginning but should serve as temporary scaffolding that’s eventually removed.
Your students need to learn to remember and recall things on their own, without being able to use these things for support. Long-term memories are strengthened through visualization and imagination, so simply asking your students to imagine things or think about them can help transfer information from working memory to long-term memory. This is a great way to develop automaticity in your students, which is the ability to recall or perform things without thinking much about them.
Tip: have students visualize concepts without support
To encourage your students’ imagination, you can slowly remove the temporary support they’re using, whether it’s text in a book or images associated with words. After your students can recall information with these supportive aids, remove them and ask your students to recall or use the information using just their memory. You can also use imagination-based worksheets to encourage this.
Eliminate extraneous cognitive load
The three different types of cognitive load can be defined as:
Intrinsic cognitive load – the amount of mental processing your students direct toward a topic or problem.
Germane cognitive load – the amount of mental processing your students use to turn working memory into long-term memory.
Extraneous cognitive load – the amount of mental processing your students direct to things not related to the topic or problem at hand.
Tips for eliminating extraneous cognitive load
Extraneous cognitive load can negatively affect your students’ learning, so your focus should be to remove it completely by presenting your information to students in a simpler way, giving them less to think about.
You can eliminate this type of cognitive load by doing the following:
- Make all instructions as clear as possible
- Ensure that students can access resources
- Leave out any non-essential information
- Write all words in an easy-to-read way
- Remove all distractions from the room
- Number steps to reduce students’ stress
Parting advice: always consider emotional load as well
When your students are worried about something or experiencing stress, this emotional load can have a major impact on their cognitive load because they’re thinking about things unrelated to learning (i.e. extraneous cognitive load). While numbering steps was suggested as one way of countering this because it can make certain processes less intimidating, you should continue to think of other ways that you can eliminate unnecessary stress in the classroom to reduce cognitive load and enhance learning.