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Week 2: Контекст (context)

I think one of the biggest obstacles for me in learning Russian will have to do with the encoding specificity principle. In other words, is my learning of Russian, primarily through Rosetta Stone, going to be context dependent? I said in my previous post that RS is always trying to get you to associate words with images, and vice versa. However, will I be able to transfer these words that I learn to other contexts? Or, even more difficult, will I be able to recall and use these words when I don’t have images to look at? After all, it’s not like all of our communication only points out the things we physically see in front of us.

Encoding specificity tells us that what we learn is best recalled in the context that we learned it in. In a recent lesson I learned some colors, none of which I can recall right off. But if I go into RS and do the color lesson, then I am much better at recalling those colors and matching them up. On the other hand, it will probably just take time to be able to recall certain words without any cues, which I can already do with some. In our textbook on page 60, Martinez (2010) talks about the difference between recall and recognition. Recognition is what I can do most of the time with the RS lessons: I see the image or hear the word and then I recognize what it is. But so far only occasionally can I recall some Russian words. And, interestingly enough, most of the words that I can recall are ones that I can place within a specific context. For this reason I am trying to give more words more context, i.e. a context that is not solely dependent on Rosetta Stone.


What I did this week is label various things around the apartment. In this way I’m trying to do two things: One, I want to add more physical context to these words, and two, I also want these Russian words to be more solidified in my long-term memory so that I can recall them easier. While this little post-it note strategy may help a little, there’s another element to encoding specificity, especially in terms of the physical context, that is crucial to learning a language, and it’s that what you learn is most effective if you learn it where you’re going to use it. In other words, it’s going to be hard to learn Russian in a context where I won’t use it and then transfer it to a context where I will. However, I’ve heard that children who have foreign languages spoken to them consistently by, for example, a parent, will likely not use that language until they are in the context where they see everyone else using it. So there’s hope. I just have to stuff all this Russian in my long-term memory so that the next time I go to Russia it will be retrieved and boom, I’m fluent. Or something like that.



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