Teacher: Ms. Kirk

Student: Zhipeng (Stevie) Liu

Time: March 4

1. Question: How long does it take a 5^th Grader of Chinese-English bilingual to rote-memorize 15 words in the Wordly Wise 3000?

By “rote-memorize”, I mean to learn the words by heart in three ways: sounds or pronunciation, shape or spelling, and meaning(s). Failure in memorizing these words is called error. It may be an error of spelling, prununciation or menaing. By the minutes used, we mean the average minutes spent on memorizing the words of more than one lesson.

2. Hypothesis: It will take one minute to rote-memorize one word in terms of prununciation, spelling and meaning(s).

3. Methods

1. Get the following things ready:

words sound shape meaning(s)

1)

2)

3)

4)

5)

6)

7)

8)

9)

10)

11)

12)

13)

14)

15)

2) Wordly Wise 3000 has 20 lessons. It is not possible to have a test of every lesson. Take any one lesson from every other 4 lessons for the test. In this way, you have 5 lessons for practicing memory. In this project, I have included Lesson One (pp.1-2), Lesson Five (p.37), Lesson Ten (pp.78-79), Lesson Fifteen (pp.119-121), and Lesson Twenty (pp.160-161).

3) Start the timer and begin the memorizing process.

4) Stop until you are sure that you have memorized them all.

5) Write down the minutes used for the 15 words.

6) Testing your memory in either of the following two ways:

a. Testing with the help of pals or parents

• Say out or dictate the 15 words;
• Self-spell out all the 15 words;
• Say out the meaning(s) of each of the 15 words;
• Check the answer.
• Mark the errors in each lesson.

b. Testing the memory yourself

• Write down the 15 words, if possible in the order as they appear in the book;
• Write down the definition of each words;
• Check the answer.
• Mark the errors made in each lesson.

7) Repeat this process for all the 5 lessons you choose for memory practice.

8) Add up the total minutes used for memorzing the words in the 5 lessons. Divide the total minutes by 5 then you have the average minutes for each lesson.

4. Results

1) The minutes used in memorizing the 15 words in each of the five lessons was recorded in Table 1 below:

Table 1: Minutes used in memorizing the 5 lessons

　

Lesson	Minutes	Errors made
		Sound	Shape	Meaning(s)
1	4	2	2	3
5	5	2	3	3
10	4	2	2	2
15	3	1	1	2
20	6	3	3	4
average	4.4	2.00	2.20	2.80

　

2) The time used in memorizing the 15 words in each of the 5 lessons was shown in a bar chart drawn on Excel.

Graph 1: Bars indicating minutes in memozring the 5 lessons

3) Table 1 tells that I used an average of 4.4 minutes in memorizing the 15 words in each of the 5 lessons.

4) Graph 1 shows the minutes used in each lesson. The horizontal axis shows the minutes for the 5 lessons, and the verticla axis tells the different minutes used for each lesson. It is clear that I used longer time for Lesson 20, and shorter time for Lesson 15.

5) It seems that within 4.4 minutes I could memorize most words, their sounds, shapes and meaning. But sometimes I failed to do so, because in each of the 5 lessons, I made errors in a few words.

6) I had difficulties in making the sound of words like “thwart” in Lesson 10, because the sound of “th” is close to “s”. Then I made a mistake in spelling this word out, taking “th” as “s”, I spelt the work as “swart”.

“Donnate” in Lesson 10 is another difficulty for me. I spelt it as “donate”, dropping one “n” out.

In Lesson 1, I took the meaning of “comapible” for “comparable”. They are very close.

5. Findings and conclusion

1) It is possible for a Chinese-English bilingual at the 5^th Elementary to memorize 15 words a bit over 4 minutes, but less than 5 minutes.

2) Perhaps our teacher may have the students spend 5 minutes or so in practicing their memory. This is might help them learn and use the words.