12, no. 2 (November 1980): 31-34 To the Editor Search

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GEORGI LOZANOV, a medical doctor who administers the Research Institute of Suggestology in Sofia, has supervised the development of a teaching method called “suggestopedia,” which is based on the use of suggestion as a teaching tool. ¹ In this method all aspects of the classroom atmosphere—teacher verbals and nonverbals, decor, materials, activities, and even pupil interaction—are orchestrated to the maximum positive impact upon students. To replicate Lozanov's work and further the study of suggestion as a pedagogic tool, North American researchers have formed the Society for Suggestive-Accelerative Learning and Teaching (SALT).

The basic assumption held by SALT researchers is that the mind creates and achieves in accordance with the belief system to which it adheres. Individuals tap their own resources, which are much greater than anyone has heretofore suspected, to the extent that they believe they can do so and are motivated to try.

Narrow belief systems, such as a conviction that learning is hard or that school is a bore, limit the degree to which the mind uses its own resources. Expanded belief systems, such as “learning is interesting and fun” and “I can accomplish much more than I ever thought I could,” in turn permit the activation of unconscious mental processes that result in unexpectedly powerful effects.

Lozanov believes that unconscious mental activity can be brought into play through suggestion, which proves effective if it unleashes some previously unactivated mental capacity, such as learning at a much faster rate than before. His foreign language classes have demonstrated rates of learning three times faster than those achieved in the best intensive programs in the United States.

We find it refreshing to examine a learning theory that makes such a direct connection between teacher input and student output. A teacher either is or is not able, through suggestion, to create saturated conditions in which students' minds function at a more advanced level. The implications for teacher training and evaluation are both exciting and ominous: exciting for those who are able to create powerful suggestive effects, ominous for those who are not.

SALT techniques include the integration of two of the fine arts, music and drama, into the practitioner's teaching style. Physical and mental relaxation exercises enable students to regulate the contents of their consciousness in order to receive lesson material in a manner uninterrupted by any of a variety of internal distractions (worry, fatigue, boredom, etc.).

Motivation, positive expectation, and the use of the capacities of the right hemisphere of the cerebrum through the formation of visual images related to lesson material are the student variables toward which suggestion is directed in an effort to engage all the mind's capabilities in the learning task.

Review of Literature

Many experiments have demonstrated the importance of the three variables—motivation, expectation, and the use of cerebral-right-hemisphere capabilities—that were manipulated by the SALT experiment we describe here. It should be noted that these variables, which we consider basic to success in learning any subject matter, provide the foundation for a coordinated generic approach to teaching.

Robert Rosenthal has repeatedly demonstrated the existence of the “Pygmalion Effect,” a metaphorical way of describing studies in which a teacher's unconsciously generated cues affect students' motivation and expectations concerning themselves and the learning process and, as a result, their academic performance. ² Rosenthal is concerned with a very important question: How does A communicate his or her expectations to B, especially when both A and B are probably unaware of the process? One of the foundations of SALT methodology is the attempt to answer that question through the understanding and use of positive coordinated verbal and nonverbal signals, together with the other sources of suggestion previously mentioned.

Considerable research has focused on mental imagery as an aid to learning. Mental imagery, the ability to “see with the mind's eye,” has also been termed “visual memory,” “inner perception,” and “visualization.” Regardless of the term used, the process described is one in which the student sees scenes flowing on a mental screen; the pictures float by as if a movie were being shown.

Matthew Erdelyi has shown that the classical Ebbinghaus curve, which describes the decline of memory for nonsense syllables over time, no longer applies when mental imagery is attached to experimental stimuli. In fact, his research indicates that when stimuli are encoded in mental images there is an increase in recall a week after testing. ³

A number of authors have investigated and/or described various aspects of suggestopedia (SALT) as applied to university-level foreign language learning. Bordon and Schuster have applied the principles of suggestion and imagery to Spanish instruction over one academic quarter and report that students learned up to three times faster than students taught by the conventional audiolingual method; the experimental section learned the same amount of Spanish as the control section, but in one third the time. Kurkov describes a preliminary experiment with a suggestopedic Russian class that learned twice as much as the control class in one semester. ⁴

On the basis of visits to Lozanov's research institute, Bancroft has provided the most detailed report on SALT, describing how Bulgarians apply suggestopedia to foreign language teaching. Allen and Racle have provided other firsthand accounts of institute classes. ⁵

In addition to the theoretical textbook cited above, Lozanov himself wrote two articles on his method and, together with his institute staff member Pashmakova, described his system to the 1977 SALT conference audience. ⁶ Although theoretical material has been generated about the applications of suggestopedia to foreign language instruction, moving from theory to practice in the schools remains a vast undertaking. Yet, the successful university-level SALT foreign language learning experiments referred to above, along with highly encouraging public school adaptations in other curriculum areas in central Iowa and Georgia schools, point toward the possibility of verification of these techniques in public school foreign language classes. ⁷

Method

The adaptation of suggestopodia to a German I class at Indianola, Iowa, High School proceeded in a five-day cycle as follows:

Monday: Introduction and Review of New Material

1. Physical exercises, mostly muscle tensing and relaxing.
2. Mind calming with music. Students relaxed and immersed themselves in soft classical music while they visualized themselves first in a safe, calm place away from the classroom, then saw themselves learning lesson material quickly and easily. After three or four minutes of this activity, the students returned to their usual attentive state of awareness.
3. Lesson presentation. The teacher introduced the new dialogue for the week, reading the material aloud in a dramatic manner, pausing to translate new vocabulary as necessary. He enlivened the presentation with cross-cultural commentary on the way the German language reflects traditional patterns of human interaction. This cultural enrichment was designed to increase student motivation by relating language to real life.
4. Review of part 1 (vocabulary). The students looked at prepared materials that displayed new German vocabulary paired with English translations. Students silently followed the teacher's pronunciation of the English translation and the foreign language phrase by reading and mentally repeating (subvocalizing) through the entire list.
5. Review of part 2 (entire lesson). The students again relaxed and listened to classical music (baroque, 4/4 time) while the teacher read the dialogue slowly, in rhythm with the music, with great “artistic expression,” that is, with deliberate melodramatic emphasis. Students were encouraged simply to listen to the music and enjoy whatever visual imagery arose in response to the scene described in the dialogue. The teacher gave variations of the suggestion that the music and imagery would implant the sentences deep in memory forever.

Tuesday, Wednesday: Practice of New Material

Students applied the week's lesson in practical real-life situations, rewording and expanding upon the dialogue to fit their interpretation of how a person might react within the scenario being studied.

Textbook grammar exercises were occasionally used to stress certain points. But the primary emphasis was upon “getting involved” in the situation and immersing oneself in the dramatized lesson.

Thursday: Review, Testing

The teacher reviewed the week's material, explaining again any particular points of usage that were questioned by students. A written test involving translation of phrases both from English to German and vice versa was administered for feedback purposes. Students kept their own grades; the teacher did not record them.

Friday: Culture Day

Class activities focused on German games, songs, dances, films, and other cultural activities, selected according to the students' current level of language mastery.

The cycle was repeated weekly throughout the year, with the exception of the time devoted to semester tests or to preparation for a performance given outside the class. Those weeks were devoted to appropriate review or rehearsal activities.

Experimental Design, Data Analysis

Another German teacher, using the same text and teaching the first-year course in his own conventional way, provided achievement comparison data. No pretests were given, because all students started without any knowledge of the language (this was not a German-speaking community). The Brooks Student Questionnaire (BSQ) was used to obtain data about school attitudes from yet another German control class in a different district.

An analysis of variance (ANOVA) design was employed; the independent (treatment) variable was SALT, as opposed to traditional instruction (control group). The dependent-variable data on which the ANOVA was performed were scores on the Common Concepts of Foreign Language Test: German (CCFLTG). An analysis of covariance (ANACOVA) was used with the three attitude scores from the BSQ as refined by Schuster and Millard. ⁸ Both pretest (covariate) and posttest data were obtained for the three BSQ independent subscales: student-teacher affective relations, perceived school stress, and learning orientation.

The CCFLTG ⁹ is presented orally; the student selects one of four lettered pictures per item as a response. The appropriateness of this testing instrument for the material covered by both the experimental and the control teachers was a major concern for us, but since they both used the same first-year German text and course outline, they felt that the material they covered was comparable and that the CCFLTG was an appropriate measure of achievement for their classes.

Results

In the Appendix, we provide tabular summaries of our experiment. Table 1 presents the ANOVA summary for the treatment (SALT vs. control) effect on German achievement test scores. A significant effect (p <.01) was observed. The SALT-taught students averaged 56.1, considerably higher than the control average of 44.5.

Table 2 presents the ANACOVA summary for the effects of treatment, sex, and pretest on BSQ learning-orientation subscale scores. A significant (p <.05) treatment effect was observed, favoring the SALT class. No significant differences between the SALT and control groups were found on the BSQ measures of affective relations and school stress.

Discussion

Questions may arise about the interpretation of the significantly higher scores of the SALT group. Is it possible that the SALT teacher had better students than the control teacher did? Could the differences be due to the teachers' personalities and their individual ways of interacting with the students?

Regarding student ability, we encountered no evidence for experimental bias. The students in both classes were mostly freshmen, none of whom had had any previous exposure to either teacher and who had no reason to prefer one to the other. There were no scheduling quirks that would tend to weight either group with higher-ability students. The teachers agreed that there was no apparent imbalance in average class intelligence. In short, since it was impossible to ensure random assignment of students to classes, we were reassured to find no obvious indicator of student-ability bias.

Regarding the teacher-pupil interaction question, we feel the test-score differences had better be the result of a positively oriented personality and changed communications style on the part of the SALT teacher. That is what SALT is all about: defining and training those personality characteristics that enable a teacher to communicate a positive impact through all the avenues available for suggestion. It must be said that the SALT teacher already tended to have a positive, enthusiastic personality well suited to SALT techniques. It must also be said the SALT teacher felt that his CCFLTG scores were appreciably higher than in previous years. Thus the logical interpretation seems to be that SALT accounted for the achievement difference between experimental and control classes.

Summary

In assessing the SALT method as applied to a ninth-grade German I class, we came to these conclusions:

1. The statistically significant difference between SALT and control classes in first-year German achievement favored SALT students.
2. The SALT class maintained a significantly better orientation to learning than did the controls, whose BSQ attitude score deteriorated. There were no significant differences in the BSQ scales of student-teacher affective relations and school stress.

We believe that this study demonstrates results similar to those of SALT efforts in other subject areas and provides the first data in support of Lozanov-type teaching in public school foreign language classes. It is becoming more and more evident that orchestrating the power of suggestion to increase motivation and positive expectation and using visual imagery both as a mind-calming device and as an added vehicle for absorbing lesson material constitute a powerful teaching methodology that is yet in its infancy. In effect, the development of suggestion and imagery as classroom teaching tools is proceeding on schedule. These techniques will undoubtedly be used more widely as they are further explored and refined.

The authors are, respectively, on the faculties of the University of Georgia. Iowa State University, and Indianola (Iowa) High School. The study described in this article was conducted with research support from the Iowa Department of Public Instruction, administered through the Heartland Area Educational Agency.

¹ Georgi Lozanov, Sugestologia (Sofia: Izdatelsvo Nauka i Izkustvo, 1971); the English translation is Suggestology and Outlines of Suggestopedy (New York: Gordon and Broach, 1978).

² See Robert Rosenthal and L. Jacobson, Pygmalion in the Classroom (New York: Holt, Rhinehart and Winston, 1968) and Rosenthal, “The Pygmalion Effect Lives,” Psychology Today , 7, No. 4 (1974), 56–63.

³ Matthew H. Erdelyi and Jeffrey Kleinbard, “Has Ebbinghaus Decayed with Time? The Growth of Recall (Hypermnesia) over Days,” Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Learning and Memory , 4 (1978), 275–89.

⁴ R. Bordon and D. Schuster's two studies both appeared in the Journal of Suggestive-Accelerative Learning and Teaching (hereafter JSALT ), 1 (1976): “Foreign Language Learning via the Lozanov Method: Pilot Studies,” 3–15, and “The Effects of a Suggestive Learning Climate, Synchronized Breathing, and Music on the Retention of Spanish Words,” 27–40. In the same volume, see also Schuster, “A Preliminary Evaluation of the Suggestive-Accelerative Lozanov Method in Teaching Beginning Spanish”, 41–47, and D. Caskey, “On-going Suggestopedic Research in Texas,” 350–59. M. Kurkov, “Accelerated Learning: An Experiment in the Application of Suggestopedia,” JSALT , 2 (1977), 27–35 (ERIC ED 181 723).

⁵ W. J. Bancroft's three articles all appear in JSALT , 1 (1976): “The Lozanov Language Class,” 48–74; “Suggestology and Suggestopedia: The Theory of the Lozanov Method,” 187–216; and “Discovering the Lozanov Method,” 263–77; Jerry J. Allen, “On Teacher Training Experience at the Research Institute of Suggestology, Bulgaria,” JSALT , 1 (1976), 304–16 (ED 180 234); Gabriel Racle, “Practical Developments and Theoretical Concepts of Suggestopaedia in Language Teaching in Canada,” JSALT , 2 (1977), 118–27 (ED 165 460).

⁶ See Lozanov's “Suggestopedia in Primary Schools,” Suggestology and Suggestopedia , 1, No. 2 (1975), 1–14; “The Bulgarian Experience,” JSALT , 2 (1977), 85–94; and K. Pashmakova, “The Training of Foreign Language Teachers in the Suggestopedic System of Education,” JSALT , 2 (1977), 128–37.

⁷ See Allyn Prichard and J. Taylor, “Adapting the Lozanov Method for Remedial Reading Instruction,” JSALT , 1 (1976), 107–15, and “Suggestopedia for the Disadvantaged Reader,” Academic Therapy , 14, No. 1 (1978). See also Schuster and Prichard, “Suggestive-Accelerative Learning and Teaching in the Classroom,” paper given at the American Psychological Association Convention, 2 Sept. 1979, New York City (ERIC ED 179 537); D. H. Schuster, R. B. Bordon, and C. A. Gritton, Suggestive-Accelerative Learning and Teaching: A Manual of Classroom Procedures Based on the Lozanov Method (Des Moines, Iowa: SALT Society, 1976) (ERIC ED 136 566); and Gritton and Bordon, “Americanizing Suggestopedia: A Preliminary Trial in a U.S. Classroom,” JSALT , 1 (1976), 83–94.

⁸ Donald H. Schuster and J. E. Millard, “The Psychometric Refinement of the Brooks Student Questionnaire,” Educational and Psychological Measurement , 38 (1978), 1097–103.

⁹ G. H. Banathy et al., Common Concepts Foreign Language Test: German (Monterey: California Testing Bureau and McGraw-Hill, 1962).

© 1980 by the Association of Departments of Foreign Languages. All Rights Reserved.

ADFL Bulletin 12, no. 2 (November 1980): 31-34

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