Some questions to start with to give your students food for thought:
1. What are your earliest memories?
2. Do you tend to remember things easily or does it normally take an effort?
3. Do you learn things by heart? When was the last time you learned a poem/ a song? Do you still remember it?
4. Do you remember facts such as dates, B-days, telephone numbers?
5. Do you think that good memory is nature or nurture?
6. Do you know of any ways of training a memory?
7. What do you think of this sentence: "We are what we remember"?
8. What sort of things do we tend to forget and which ones do we remember best?
9. Would it be a good idea to remember everything? (hyperthymesia)
wikipedia
10. Is forgetting important and why?
If you need more inspiration for a warm-up have a look at this
memory 1
or this
memory 2
or this
memory 3
I personally work on a text entitled "Foreign languages: how to memorise vocabulary". We do teach languages but rarely talk how to really learn them, and this text creates an opportunity to think and talk about it, ask students about their experience of leaning a language and the methods they use (if any). You will quickly realise that the majority of them have no methods at all, and their main contact with English is through American TV series. There are obviously exceptions: I have had people in my groups who write and sing their songs in English or post videos on youtube and have to react to comments of viewers in English. But the whopping majority doesn't have much of a contact with the language apart from the classes, and quite a lot of people simply learn vocabulary by heart.
You can find the original version of the text here:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/educationadvice/9816185/Foreign-languages-how-to-memorise-vocabulary.html
I have adapted it a bit, underlined some words and come up with questions related to general comprehension as well as particular expressions.
After the text (reading is never a very exciting activity for students) I do a "tell-me-a-story" activity.
Here is how it goes:
give students between 15 and 20 completely unrelated words; they may range from "light bulbs" to "tuxedos". Try to keep a balance between words your students may know and those that they are unfamiliar with. Ask them to create a story in which they will have to use all of the words.(they can't write it down, however).
The weirder the story, the better. It is one of the techniques of memorising, mentioned, by the way, in the video above. I find students reacting quite enthusiastically to this activity, (generally speaking). And, on top of that, it gives them a tangible proof that thanks to this method they are capable of remembering quite a lot of words.
There are some interesting expressions related to memory that would be worth introducing to students in one form or another:
to have a memory like a sieve
on the tip of one's tongue
at the back of one's mind
bear something in mind
ring a bell
jog one's memory
rack one's brains
it escapes me
it has slipped my mind
my mind has gone blank
refresh my memory
etc.
talking about memories may also lead us to the topic of confessions:
here is a lesson for you to check out.
It is for pre-intermediate level, but if need be, can be adapted to a higher one.
(MacMillan again:)
http://www.insideout.net/blog/elessons/video-lesson-23-confessions
