Chess Pedagogy – Chess and Memory

19 November 2020

Lecturers
Students

Teacher Education

Autonomous learning
Classroom Context

Hungarian

Hungarian

B2
C1

Video

Vocabulary
Grammar
Pragmatics
Prosody

Listening
Speaking
Critical Thinking
Writing
Mediation

This teaching resource available on a reliable and renowned organisation’s website (Sakkmatyi) suits the needs of upper-intermediate university students who study in Teacher Education, Pedagogy, or Chess Coaching, and aspire to acquire Hungarian as a foreign language with special attention to the specific terms frequently used as part of the vocabulary of the chess sport. They need to develop their listening skills and at the same time they need to expand technical related vocabulary. This resource assists both the lecturer, who can use this video with students in the classroom, and students who, rather autonomously, can explore it as well.

The target students are primarily the ones attending teacher training, pedagogy, or chess trainer and coach programmes of any level (Bachelor, Master, PhD, or even Post-Graduate). The teaching resource is ideal to be used in small seminar groups (up to 15 students). The employed method should incorporate clear instructions from the teacher who is to guide the activities in which gradually takes on a facilitator role from the initial one of an instructor. Cooperative project work is also essential for effective discussion of the topic. As a result, students will practice the Hungarian language by developing their listening and speaking skills while obtaining some of the vocabulary items of chess in Hungarian. To avoid any risks, students are to be in a safe distance to see and hear the video well. The resource can be used in subject-specific intracurricular or extracurricular university seminars.

Warm-up activity: Make a presentation of the memory exercises represented in the video and project them one after the other to the students who have to do them. Discuss the scores they achieved in the tasks.
Step 1: Pre-watching activity. Tell the students they are going to watch a video on the topic chess and memory. Ask the students to answer the following questions based on the video in writing: “What characterises short-term memory?”, “What boundary does our short-term memory have?”, “What characterises long-term memory?”, “Why does chess improve memory and logical thinking?”, “What is the role of arraying in memory performance?”, “What chess-based memory-development games are mentioned?”. The video will allow students to recognise and practise vocabulary, in addition to practising their listening skills. Students do the preparation task first.
Step 2: Watching the video. Students watch the video once or twice and answer the questions. Make sure the quality of it is acceptable and that students can hear the video with no interference, and also that they can see it well.
Step 3: Students give feedback on their answers that are discussed afterwards.
Follow-up activity: Make pairs of students and give the pairs a set amount of time to invent more memory-development games based on the chess board and the chess pieces. Finally, the pairs present or demonstrate (on a physical chess board or projected from a computer) their ideas. During the presentations, students also have to use vocabulary introduced and practiced during the class (e.g. pre-watching and watching activities).