HOW TO STRENGTHEN STUDENTS' MEMORY

Since 1971 the revolution of communication can not be dammed up anymore. The world has become a place to swap great information. By communicating, people in all over the world can share their knowledge. According to UNESCO statistical year book (1992) the world prints more than 800.000 totles of books every year. It means that information is so neded for te revolution on anything which is known well. Everyone must adapt them selves to the changes.

The problem appears when language used to communicate is a second language. The learners must be able to use the language in reading as well as speaking which need mastery of vocabulary. In Indonesia in which English is second language, the skills achievement seem hard enough. This caused by many factors. One of them is how hard to keep the vocabularies in our minds.

Many students often memorize some words easily. But the vocabularies are often erased easily also. Actually, English just has 550.000 words. But the linguist believe that we just need 2.000 to 3.000 words in common conversations. It means, if we just memorize about 2.000 words, and we understand them, actually it is enough for us to talk in our new language. It�s not a big deal to memorize those 2.000 words, the problem is how to strengthen our memory ?

There are many theories to strengthen our memory. But this time, I will tell you that emotion creates a strengthened memory. A study done by Mc Gaugh and Larry Cahill shows clearly that emotion, event the ordinary one, strengthened memory. During the study, two groups of students were brought to watch twelve slides. The slides were about a child that crosses the street with his mother or visiting a patient in the hospital. The first groups was told on ordinary story in accordance with the pictures ; a boy with his mother who were visiting his father, a surgeon. The second group was told a very dramatic and noises story ; a car crashed the boy, a surgeon tried to heal the brooken bones. Two weeks later, the students were given a surprisingly memory test. The students who were told on ordinay story had a terrible memory. The second group that was given a very dramatic story remembered well. In the other test, psychologist asked some persons to listen a list of words including emotive words like mother-breast, dead-body, and rapist. The participant remembered the emotive words better than the neutral ones.

In an English class, if we want our students have many vocabularies and never forget them, we must create a highly emotive atmosphere in our class.