Cognitive Load with Layers of Multilingual Complexity


Cognitive Load with Layers of Multilingual Complexity

By Shawn Perry


Following our PD session which we unpacked about Cognitive Load, I thought it would be a great investigative activity for Grade 3 students to do from a time-keeping  point of view (for our current UOI), and as a math activity.  We used the color-coded words on the white board and had the students try to process and read them as quickly as they could.
 

Without giving students a lot of instruction, I asked them to read the words, and they took turns reading them. Naturally, they read the words not the color.  Most students read a single row of words in about 2 seconds.

We extrapolated that it would take about 12 seconds to read all 6 rows, if they kept reading at the same pace.  

For the next step the students were asked to “read the colors”.   The students were surprised that they took quite a bit longer to read the same row.  The average was about 6 seconds.  Again, by extrapolation, we calculated that if they read at the same pace, it would take about 36 seconds to read the entire 6 rows.    They were flummoxed when all three volunteers, including our only native English speaker took about one minute to read the entire 6 rows.  

We speculated that the readers took longer when “reading colors” because their brain had to process the color, at the same time as being tempted to read the written word. 

We then inserted a translanguaging twist to our activity.  We asked one of our Korean speakers, and a Lithuanian speaker to process and read it in their languages.    I asked the class members to speculate if they would take the same amount of time (roughly one minute), or if it would be more.  

Almost all students speculated that their clocked time would be the same or even less as they would very comfortable in reading in their mother tongue.  It should be noted that English is the second language to all students in my class except for one.  The students were surprised that, in fact, the Korean and Lithuanian student took the longest of all to read the six rows, about 1 ½ minutes each.  

After some reflection, the students realized that the Korean and Lithuanian students had to process three layers of information, the color, English words, and then process the color into their language. 

It was a very interesting exercise in time keeping, collecting and calculating averages, and thinking about information processing.  For me as a teacher it was about understanding cognitive load, and how we as teachers benefit from understanding the layers of complexity that second language learners need to process for understanding.  

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