Sort of out of the blue I started thinking about MEMORY. As in, the way we talk about memory in human language processing and learning, although I'm not clear how that separates from memory in general learning or just memory of life.
So I remember how memory was always presented as an academic topic as something like THREE parts--processing, short-term, and long-term. And one obvious problem for learning another language is that, no matter how much we pound it into our 'heads', it doesn't 'write to long-term memory (of course that is not the only problem).
But it seems to me that the only way memory works in conscious or active learning is if we put it into processing memory. I doubt short-term memory can just write to long-term memory. This is why, to try and remember, we repeat things to ourselves. Or perhaps short-term memory just blends into long-term memory, and long-term learning is simply over-learning into the same memory.
Now I have to work on breaking down processing memory into parts that might be useful for thinking about second language learning--such as 'phonological memory', and why that proves problematic for second language learners.
