Philosophers were the first people who paid attention to memory, and who tried to identify its characteristics and to give a clear definition of it.
However, the pure philosophical outlook left other questions about the capacity of memory in different fields as unanswered. It was then that psychology within philosophy tried to study the place of memory in the
process of learning. This scientific study dates back to a century and a half ago. In the last decade, after the doctrines of behaviorisim and the birth of cognitivism, a great evolution occurred in the knowledge of man on the mechanisms of the memory. Following numerous research, the various parts of the brain and memory were identified, like short-term memory, working memory, long-term memory, semantic memory which are all closely related to the process of a foreign language learning. In this article, the role of memory in the process of the foreign language learning will be studied.
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