Reflection and feedback

What are some useful strategies for remembering things?

Ask students to reflect on the strategies that they might use to remember things. For example, associating a mental image with a particular thing, or repetition through writing something down or speaking it aloud.

If students don't suggest it, introduce them to the idea of mnemonics, which are memory aids. Wikipedia has an excellent entry on mnemonics at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mnemonic. Ask students for any mnemonics that they know. Wikipedia lists an amazing range of mnemonics for remembering the order of the planets in our solar system from the sun, for example. Other examples of simple mnemonics from the Wikipedia site include some that are sung to simple tunes or use rhyming words.

Encourage students to share their mnemonics for learning Indonesian. Some examples include:

• Many students mix up the numbers 4 and 6 (empat and enam) - but maybe remembering that you 'pat' a dog which has four legs will help.

• How can you remember the meanings of kanan and kiri (right and left)? Perhaps simply that kanan and right both have five letters; and kiri and left both have four.

Challenge students to work independently or with a partner to create mnemonics for remembering one or more of the rules for forming Me-verbs. Share these and discuss which are the most effective. Display.

What connections are there with English?

Ask students to reflect on the use of prefixes in English and Indonesian. In what ways are they similar and / or different? Think of some of the common prefixes in English. Do these prefixes have a meaning or change the meaning of the base word?

Compare dictionary entries in English and Indonesian bilingual dictionaries. What information is given in each? How are they organised? In what ways are they similar and / or different?

You may want to model referring to both English-Indonesian and Indonesian-English bilingual dictionaries when looking for an Indonesian word. This skill is not modelled in Kata-kata dasar.

Taking this further

It is wonderful when you understand some of the rules that are operating in a language, and can apply them to new words that you meet. In this learning object students have been introduced to the ways that some verbs and nouns are formed from a base word that is a verb. They have learnt how to recognise the base word when they meet a MeN-verb or a PeN-noun, so that they can use the dictionary. When they meet a new word that begins with one of the recognisable prefixes, they should understand that the word is a verb or a noun and how it relates to the base word.

This could be taken further as there are other prefixes, suffixes and circumfixes that can also be studied and understood. This Indonesian outline diagram (in Word or PDF) only begins to unpack what is happening when affixes are used with base words that are verbs. The introduction to verbs (in Word or PDF) from the Awareness Raising section provides the context for this diagram.

For a more comprehensive - and therefore more accurate - discussion, see James Snedden's Indonesian Reference Grammar (details in the Offline Resources section).