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The world has changed and so have English language
teaching resources; even though some trends are not, strictly
speaking, new.
Take, for example, the idea of spaced repetition,
which is a buzz word at the moment. Back in 1885 Hermann
Ebbinghaus carried out an experiment designed to measure
how quickly we forget. He discovered that, unless
new information is reinforced, we quickly forget what we have
learned. In the 1930s, other researchers followed this up by
looking at how often we need to reinforce new information, and
found that spacing out repetition — revising the information
every two days, then every four, then every eight, and so on —
was most effective.
So, we’ve known about spaced repetition for quite a
while, but it has been difficult to implement, as it involves
keeping track of an awful lot of words. However, this is
something that a language-learning computer program or app
can do brilliantly. And so we’re starting to see more and more
language-learning apps which use the principles of spaced
repetition.
In “The world has changed and so have English language teaching resources” (R. 1 and 2), the word “so” means