MSI Press Blog

  Many years ago, German linguist Dr. Nina Garrett made a fascinating observation: when students learn a new grammatical category—say, the past tense—they often start making mistakes in something they had already mastered, like the present tense. It feels counterintuitive. Shouldn’t learning more make you better, not worse? Here’s what’s actually happening. 1. Your brain is reorganizing the system, not adding a file Grammar isn’t stored as isolated rules. When you learn a new category, your brain reshapes the entire network of forms, meanings, and patterns. That reorganization temporarily destabilizes what was previously solid. It’s not regression; it’s restructuring. 2. Similar forms compete for airtime Past and present tense share a lot of features—same verbs, similar endings, overlapping contexts. When a new form enters the system, the brain tests it everywhere, including places it doesn’t belong. This is why learners suddenly say things like “I go-ed” or “I am go y...

Excerpt from  Think Yourself into Becoming a Language Learning Super Star Memory, Forgetting, and Lapses   Just to reinforce the matter—or in case you are skipping around in this book and did not see the earlier memory discussion; there are three stages to memory: awareness/attention, encoding/storing, and recall/retrieval. In this section, we are focused on what happens after you have learned something and need to use it. When you want to remember, you will need to recall the information you have learned. One of three things he can happen, and we have all experienced all three: we remember it perfectly (yippee—hope that happens always, but it does not), we remember it imperfectly (oh, too typical), or do not remember it all (even if we remember having spent time studying it). Knowing what has happened in each case, brings us to a point of orienting our study and actions for better recall, as well as teaching us not to beat ourselves up when we have a glitch or lapse. Reme...

Cindy McKinley ( 365 Teacher Secrets for Parents , coauthored with Patti Trombly) shared some of her secrets for avoiding summer learning loss with reporter Kerry Griffiths.