Wednesday, November 18, 2015

Nov 21 Mnemonic presentation for Busan KOTESOL Meeting

Updated with material from the presentations!

This is mostly a placeholder for my November 21 presentation at HQ in Gwangalli. Embedded is the presentation slide deck that I will use, but it is likely to change before that time.

I will also add photos from the event here.  My presentation is titled:

Mnemonics and Synonyms in ESL settings

and the participants will make their own number-shape mnemonics which I will post pictures of here  are posted below.





I am posting this early so I can offer attendees a link and QR code at the event.
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And now the photos!







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One thing I did not do well was explain how to build on these mnemonics for repeated use.  A participant at the talk asked how he, or a student, could prepare more than one mnemonic.  In our case, have a group of twelve words describing tastes (sweet, sour crunchy, smooth, ...) and another group of twelve words offering synonyms for see (look, watch, glance, leer, ... - you may note my definition of 'synonym' is is pretty broad) and maybe another list of historic dates and another list of chemical principals.

I had, in fact, described how, but had not linked the two as clearly as I should have.  Indeed, it is only in hindsight that I see that I had offered an answer.  This number-shape mnemonic can be seen as a specialized form of the Method of Loci mnemonic.  In MoL, you think about a walking route you know very well and connect various points on the route to the thing you want to remember.

This was described in my presentation but the slides only offer a few points for emphasis or clarity - my talk was a 'talk' not a video where you only needed to read the info and ignore the speaker.

So the Number-Shape mnemonic is a form of Method of Loci, with a route everyone knows - from '1' to '12', more or less. We are linking each number to an idea that really has little to do with first or one or math.

It would be interesting to look at a Letter- Shape mnemonic with the western alphabet and with the Korean one.  Koreans don't seem to put the same emphasis on alphabetical order, or they do but very differently than English speakers do.
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It's interesting having our meetings in a bar.  In practical terms, the lighting is weird and best next to the window. It was nice to have a beer with friends while watching a talk (I presented first and K Kelley, the chapter president, presented second.  The final picture is of one of her slides).

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