So today I'm back with another video about second language acquisition research.

So what we're gonna talk about today is again, vocabulary

'cause I get so many questions about vocabulary How to review.

How I should learn vocabulary.

'cause I know people suffer a lot from this We all know that reviewing is key to retention

Retention means to like keep the word in your memory

The question for today is: how often should we review vocabulary for long-term retention?

In other words, how often should I review so that I never forget again?

Actually, researchers have looked into this topic before.

Umm trying to see what kind of study intervals would affect retention.

So today we're gonna look at a longitudinal research that lasted for 9 years.

And see what kind of learning pattern would help long-term vocabulary retention.

Without further ado, let's get into the video.

This is a longitudinal research that lasted for 9 years.

4 participants were exposed to 300 new words.

These 300 words were divided into 6 groups.With 50 words in one group.

These six groups were assigned to 14, 28, and 56 days of spacing.

At the same time, they are also assigned to 13 or 26 sessions.

This is a 2X3 factorial design.

After the sessions, the researcher followed up with retention tests 1, 2, 3 and 5 years

later, to see how many words these participants remember.

So I know the design of this research is a little bit complicated.

But let me tell you what the results were.

In this research, these people reviewed the vocabulary once in 14, 28 or 56 days.

But no matter how often they review, they need to review 7 times.

In other words, after 7 sessions, they remember most of the vocabulary.

This is a number to aim for.

Another result was pretty intuitive.

The group of words that were reviewed every 56 days were difficult for the learners to

remember since they only encounter these words every 2 months.

On the other hand, the learners performed better on the groups that were reviewed every

14 days.

They remember more words from these groups.

However, the researchers did follow-up retention tests and found out that more vocabulary was

remembered from the 56-day groups.

The words that were reviewed every 56 days were difficult to learn in the first place

but were remembered by the participants longer.

To be honest, I didn't expect this result from the research and this is a really interesting

finding.

In other words, longer intervals resulted in higher recall rate, regardless of the really

difficult process of acquisition in the first place.

They did really well 5 years later.

This is really amazing.

So now we're gonna look at the takeaway for the learners.

Number 1, as I said, no matter how often you review, 7 session is the number to aim for

acquisition, which means that you could review once in 2 days, 3 days, 7 days.

It's your choice, but you have to review for at least 7 times to remember a word.

Number 2, cramming a lot of vocabulary before exams may seem really efficient.

However, long-term memory should be the goal that learners aim for.

Repetition has always been emphasized in vocabulary acquisition but in this research, we can see

that longer intervals actually result in longer memory retention, which means that you could

review once in a very long time, but as long as you keep on doing it, in the long run,

you don't forget it anymore.

Number 3, if you learn something in a foreign language classroom and remember it for the

first five years.

In the following 25 years, it is very unlikely that you are going to forget about it.

Next time when you plan your review sessions, try to incorporate both short and long intervals.

For example, if you're trying to learn a new list, review it more often.

Maybe review it once in 3 days or once in a week.

After 7 sessions, as we said, 7 sessions is the number to aim for for vocabulary acquisition.

So after 7 sessions, you could review maybe once in 2 months or once in 3 months.

The goal is to have long-term memory.

And longer intervals would lead to longer retention in the future.

So when you're designing your learning schedule, don't forget to incorporate both short and

long intervals and aim for 7 sessions for vocabulary acquisition.

This will definitely help you to have a longer memory of the words you learn.

There are many other factors that determine the difficulty of learning a word.

Besides frequency that we discussed in this video, other factors may be the word length

or the cognateness.

So cognates are words in different languages that are similar in meaning and form.

For example, time in Japanese is ta-i-mu.

It sounds similar and the meaning is the same.

This kind of vocabulary is definitely easier to remember.

So this is pretty much it for this week.

There will be another video about second language acquisition research coming up.

So stay tuned.

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Click the like button for this video.

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if you're nerdy as me!

Anyways, thank you for watching and don't forget to let me know your thoughts in the

comment section......I gotta go!!

Bye bye~