"Triple coding" means that the students learn with the help of the teacher the new contextual vocabulary by using gestures, by mental visualization during relaxation or by drawing mind maps and by "helping pair work" before they have to do their homework. In the first two phases, the teacher offers different "learning aids", for instance, explaining them the Latin roots of 28 of the 54 new words, as the students had studied Latin along with English for 5 years. The short-term review after the 45 minutes of learning (54 words) with triple coding showed that the students could translate 40,5 words (75 %) into English. The first long-term review after one month showed there has been no significant increase in memorizing vocabulary of the students that they had been learning for the past one month. Three months later, the triple coding learning was repeated, but this time with mind maps. The long term review after 4 months showed that students could translate 78 % of the new words and after 10 months 74% into English. In an additional controlling it could be demonstrated that the good performance can be attributed to the method and not to accidental revision during the 10 months.

Keywords: vocabulary learning, short-term memory, long-term memory, learning by gesture, mental visualization, relaxation, mind maps, helping pair-work, key-word method

• Full Text: PDF(576KB)
• Full Text: HTML