【正确答案】 B

【答案解析】[解析] 13-15 Students often complain that they have bad memories. In the past, I have always commented that students, no matter what their age, do not have bad habits. They do not have regular study habits. They do not use the language whenever they have the opportunity. They do not make a continuous effort to think in the language. They fail to repeat earlier material at planned intervals. A lot of this is true, but the reasons for poor memory in language learning may be much more complex. It is not always the fault of the student. A lot of the time, the reason for poor recall may lie in teaching methods which from the very beginning give too much emphasis to translation and reading. The criticism I would make here is that translation and reading are applications of language. They require conscious effort. But we are not conscious of our own language, of the mental process of using it. We use it effortlessly. So why should we operate in the conscious mind when we first approach a second language? Surely, that will be slow and laborious. It asks too much of our working memory which, because it is so limited, will fail us. At that point, the student complains of a bad memory. But he Js wrong. He is in fact suffering from bad teaching and/or learning methods. If you ask a student to translate a sentence, he must operate a lot of the time in his own language. If he does not understand a word, he will go to his dictionary and look it up. This is a useful thing to do if you are translating, but a completely useless process for learning a second language, for the simple reason that his strong first language will interfere with and suppress the weaker second. In fact, anything of the weaker language is never remembered from the process of translation. The same criticism applies to word lists that contain both first and second languages, and to books which interweave the two languages. Again, the student complains he can hardly recall anything. And once again, the problem lies not in himself, but in inappropriate "conscious" learning methods. 13. What did the speaker comment the past when he heard his students complain about their bad memories?