Reducing Cognitive Load and Clutter

Students returned last week. My first week back with students is done. My summer is officially over. 

With my Latin 1 classes, again I am doing a Latinized version of a German 1 lesson which I adapted from Eric Richards. This lesson focuses on the words play, well, badly, has, is, and not. At CI Summit this past summer, I demonstrated a very condensed version of this 5-day lesson plan in three 1-hour sessions with Squad 2 (who knew no Latin) so that they could experience learning Latin like one of my own students on the first days of school. 

After teaching gestures for the words play, well, and badly, I had students draw on whiteboards what they like to play (a sport, a game, an activity - not an instrument thought. In Latin, one does not play an instrument but rather sings with one). From there, I began PQAs with the target words. Sentences like "Marcie basketball ludit" "Marcie, ludisne basketball bene?" and "Barbara backgammon ludit." While the activity went well, I did have some participants ask me why I used the English words for basketball and backgammon and not the Latin words - are there Latin words for them? I responded, "Yes, there are indeed Latin words for them, but I deliberately chose not to use them, because my focus for this lesson was on the words ludit and bene. Using the Latin words for basketball and backgammon would have given you too much Latin on which to focus - I don't care that you acquire the words for basketball and backgammon - those are not important right now. I want you to begin acquiring the words ludit and bene. I do not want to waste your memory bandwidth on unimportant words at the moment." To use educationese, my goal was to reduce the cognitive load for these learners. 

Too often with novice-level learners, in our attempt to expose students to the language, we unknowingly overload our messages to them, even if those messages are comprehensible. Too many functions are going on in their brains. While Latin purists will have a problem with my use of Latinglish with these learners, I am doing everything I can to reduce the clutter which would impede their acquisition of my target words.  

One way to reduce clutter for novice-level students when trying to target specific vocabulary words are to use cognates (which does not always work, because as teachers we know that cognates which are obvious to us are not obvious at all to students), proper nouns, and brand names. Examples:

• Carlos has Takis.
• Sheryl goes to Target.
• Jamal is bringing a CrockPot.

A way to reduce clutter in novice readings is to present just one idea per sentence and then build upon it either with an additional idea, recombining of ideas, or a compound sentence. Examples:

• Marcus has a dog. The dog is big. Marcus has a big dog.
• Jolene sees her sister. Her sister is in the kitchen. Jolene sees her sister in the kitchen, and she shouts.

Anyhow last week, I began this lesson with my Latin 1 students on the first day of school, and it went well! My students Brendan plays football and plays it well, Zoe plays volleyball but not very well (she likes it though) and Sara plays Uno well (I do not know how one plays Uno badly lol). I look forward to learning about my students this year in Latin!