The Study Of The Application Of Memory In The Acquisition Of English

The process of foreign language acquisition is, to some extent, the struggle against forgetting. However, few persons were born with super memory. Most people get good memory by means of proper training. The thesis presents a study on the application of the memory theory into the acquisition of English vocabulary, sentences and discourse in China. It aims at making language teachers combine memory theories with the characteristics of English teaching and acquisition, analyze and reorganize the learning materials so as to activate the former knowledge kept in the learners' mind, and make the acquisition of English easier.On the basis of psychology, linguistics and psycholinguistics, pertinent literature has been reviewed. According to the memory theories of the "Modal Memory Model" provided by Atkinson and Shriffrin, and "levels-of-processing approach" by Craik and the "process of language processing" by Garman, the processes of the acquisition of vocabulary, sentences and discourse have been analyzed. Since English words are stored by means of association in the network of the human mind, keyword method is used to remember new words by means of associating the new words with the experience or what is kept in mind. According to the Chunk Theory, one long and complex sentence can be parsed into several chunks and these chunks could be reorganized and become easier to remember. Parsing the discourse into several main ideas and supporting details, one systematic and integrated means, which identifies, encodes, stores, and retrieves information from the discourse, will then be provided.Two experiments have been conducted to prove the efficiency of the above methods of the acquisition of English sentences and discourse. And the data have been analyzed according to the T-test in SPSS program. The significance of the experiment on sentence is 0.003 < 0.05, and the significance of the other experiment is 0.019 < 0.05. These results show that the two methods are effective to the acquisition of English sentences and discourse.