The suggestopedia

Suggestopedia was another educational innovation that promised great results if we would simply use our brain power.According to Dr. Georgi Lazanov ( 1979),people are capable of learning much more than they give themselves credit for.Drawing on insights from Soviet psychological research on extrasensory perception,Lozanov created a method for learning that capitalized on relaxed states of mind for maximum retention of material.Music was central to his method.Baroque music,with its 60 beats per minute and its specific rhythm,created the kind of “relaxed concentration” that led to “superlearning” (Ostrander and Schroeder 1979:65 ). According to Lozanov, during the soft playing of Baroque music, one can take in tremendous quantities of material due to an increase in alpha brain waves and a decrease in blood pressure and pulse rate.

In applications of Suggestopedia to foreign language learning. Lozanov and his followers experimented with the presentation of vocabulary, readings dialogs, role-plays, drama, and a variety of other typical classroom activities. Some of the classroom methodology did not have any particular uniqueness.The primary difference lay in a significant proportion of activity carried out in soft , comfortable seats in relaxed states of consciousness.. Students were encouraged to be as “childlike” as possible, yielding all authority to the teacher and sometimes assuming the roles(and names) of native speakers of the foreign language. Students thus became “ suggestible” Lozanov (1979:2 72) described the concert session portion of a Suggestopedia language class: At the beginning of the session, all conversation stops for a minute or two , and the teacher listens to the music coming from a tape-recorder. He waits and listens to several passages in order to enter into the mood of the music and then begin
to read or recite the new text in their textbooks where each lesson is translated into the mother tongue. Between the first and second part of the concert, there are several minutes of solemn silence. In some cases, even longer pauses can be given to permit the students to stir a little. Before the beginning of the second part of the concert, there are again several minutes of silence and some phrases of the music are heard again before the teacher begins to read the text. Now the students close their textbooks and listen to the teacher’s reading. At the end, the students silently leave the room. They are not told to do any homework on the lesson they have just had except for reading it cursorily once before going to bed and again before getting up in the morning.

Suggestopedia was criticized on a number of fronts. Scovel (1979 ) showed quite eloquently that Lozanov’s experimental data,in which he reported astounding results with Suggestopedia,were highly questionable.Moreover,the practicality of using Suggestopedia was an issue that teachers faced where music and comfortable chairs were not available.More serious was the issue of the place of memorization in language learning.On a more positive note, we can adapt certain aspects of Suggestopedia in our communicative classroom without “buying into” the whole method.A relaxed and unanxious mind,achieved through music and/or any other means,will often help a learner to build confidence.Role playing,drama,and other activities may be very helpful techniques to stimulate meaningful interaction in the classroom.And perhaps; we should never underestimate the “superlearning” powers of the human brain.