It caught my attention the oral presentation about Suggestopedia. If music makes easier and nicer the English learning process, I want to know more about it. So, I decided to read more about this topic and I found an amazing material on internet, it is an interview with Dr Georgi Lozanov, the founder of Suggestopedia.
Dr Georgi Lozanov
According to Dr Lazanov, music is importat but is not the key :’( We have to be careful because he says that many people misunderstand what Suggestopedia is. At the beginning he developed a method of teaching which he called Suggestopedia, which was used and tested extensively for teaching reading and math to children in Bulgarian primary schools in the 60’s and 70’s. It had tremendous results. Children in the Suggestopedia classes were learning to read up to five times faster than children in the control classes where standard methods were used – and these results were verified by a team of UNESCO moderators.
Then, he developed with Dr Evalina Gateva a language learning method, and this method is what most people call Suggestopedia. Dr. Lozanov says that “many people are doing things and calling them Suggestopedia which are definitely not part of my method. Neuro-Linguistic Programming, for example, is not Suggestopedia. Multiple Intelligences theory is not Suggestopedia. Brain Gym is not Suggestopedia. You cannot mix these things with Suggestopedia. Relaxation exercises are not Suggestopedia. Many people think that students have to go into some special trance state in order to do Suggestopedia. This is not so. Students in my classes are alert and awake. And I would like to say that hypnosis is definitely not part of my method. Hypnosis is about taking away people’s freedom – Suggestopedia is about giving people freedom. I was under house arrest in Sofia and unable to tell people outside Bulgaria what Suggestopedia really was”… how about that?
So… what is the real Suggestopedia? The suggestion given by most traditional learning methods is that learning is hard; that the only way people can learn is if the teacher breaks down the information into very small chunks so that they can understand it. The deliberate impression given by Suggestopedia, by comparison, is that learning is fun and easy – which is the suggestion in the name. Teachers give much more material than in a traditional class, with the clear assumption that students will be able to learn it without difficulty.
Once againg, music is important but is not the key. What is essential is that the students feel relaxed and happy. They are relaxed because there is no pressure to speak or to do anything stressful, and also no homework, by the way (yuupi, personally, I don’t have problem with this). Suggestopedia is also nothing to do with anything that has been written about the Mozart Effect. This method uses classical music because it does not have words that will interfere with listening to the texts. Teachers need to be specially trained to teach Suggestopedically. The behavior of the teacher, the voice of the teacher, everything the teacher does has an impact on the students and their learning… the success of the method depends on having exceptional teachers. We don’t believe in good or bad students, only in the importance of excellent teachers”.
If you want to read the whole interview, click on http://www.etprofessional.com/content/view/528/5/
In his book Mistakes and Correction, Julian Edge (1989) says that when we teachers decide to correct our students, “we have to be sure that we are using correction positively to support learning.”
