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Susan Norman interviews Dr Georgi Lozanov, the founder of Suggestopedia. Dr Georgi Lozanov, a Bulgarian physician and psychoanalyst, first came to the attention of the western world in the 1970s with a teaching method he called Suggestopedia. Over the years many language teachers have been curious about this method and have tried it out to a greater or lesser extent in ELT contexts. A certain amount of confusion has been generated about what Suggestopedia actually entails, so teachers may be interested to hear Dr Lozanov’s own thinking about his teaching method and how it has been interpreted and implemented. Shortly before his 80th birthday, I met up with Dr Lozanov and discovered that he is not very impressed with the way his work has been represented. I asked him, therefore, if he would like to set the record straight. (Dr Lozanov speaks good English, but for the sake of clarity and brevity, I have often summarised his responses.) SN Dr Lozanov, I have been interested in your work for a long time and I have twice heard you present. The impression I’ve got is that you disagree with the way people are using Suggestopedia. Is that so? GL Basically, yes. I developed a method of teaching which I called Suggestopedia, which was used and tested extensively for teaching reading and maths to children in Bulgarian primary schools in the sixties and seventies. It had tremendous results. Children in the Suggestopedic 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. I am a scientist and the results I have published about the results achieved with Suggestopedia have all been scientifically validated. However, today there are many people teaching what they call Suggestopedia – but these are people who have never been taught by me. They are being trained by people who have never been taught by me. There are ‘Suggestopedic’ societies which supposedly teach my work which have no contact with me. I am not saying that they are not doing good teaching, but I am saying that they should not call it Suggestopedia unless they actually know what I say Suggestopedia is. And if they are teaching in a way which produces the results of Suggestopedia, then I look forward to reading about their method and the research which proves their results. SN You have a point. When I first heard of Suggestopedia, it was as a language teaching method. GL That is also my method which I developed together with Dr Evalina Gateva. This language learning method is what most people call Suggestopedia. But I know from the internet that some people are doing things and calling them Suggestopedia which are definitely not part of my method. SN Can you give any examples? GL 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. Also, 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. SN But you have done hypnosis? GL Yes. I was originally a doctor of medicine and I did many experiments with hypnosis which were very powerful and effective, but this is nothing to do with my teaching method. Unfortunately, there was a television programme in Germany a long time ago which showed a so-called Suggestopedic class where all the students appeared tobe asleep, either lying down covered in a blanket or relaxing in special ‘Suggestopedic’ chairs. The impression was that you just have to relax and listen to special music and you will learn a language. This is rubbish. I think there were even people in Canada who based their whole method on special chairs. At the time, though, I was under house arrest in Sofia and unable to tell people outside Bulgaria what Suggestopedia really was. SN So was this how the false impression of Suggestopedia started? GL Well, the sequence of events was that I was having spectacular results with my method in Bulgaria and people outside Bulgaria heard about it and visited me at my Institute in Sofia to find out more – including Peter O’Connell, who started your own organisation [SEAL, Society for Effective Affective Learning, set up to promote Suggestopedia and other leading-edge learning approaches]. So I was very happy to show them my work. I also travelled to the States and explained Suggestopedia to various people there. However at that time the authorities in Bulgaria were not so happy about sharing ideas with the west and they placed me under house arrest and stopped me from having contact with people outside the country – and that lasted for ten years. In the meantime two journalists had interviewed me and written a book called ‘Superlearning’ which was their name for Suggestopedia, but they hadn’t really understood what I was doing. So while I continued my work in Bulgaria, people in the west were developing their own ideas based on what they thought they had understood about my method. Much of this was incomplete at best and completely wrong at worst. SN Just before you put the record straight and tell us what Suggestopedia actually is, I notice that you are now calling your method ‘desuggestopedia’? Is this something different? GL The name is not important. People have told me that the name ‘Suggestopedia’ was not a good one, and also many other people who have not been trained by me say that they are doing ‘Suggestopedia’, so I am now using the name ‘Desuggestopedia’. For a very short time we also considered the name ‘Reserve Capacity Communication’ which was shortened to ReCaCo. When I train people now, though, I train them in ‘Desuggestopedia’ to differentiate my work from what other people are doing, and to show that these people understand the work I am doing now. SN What was the significance of the name ‘Reserve Capacity Communication’? GL The name reflected the key understanding that the mind has huge capacities which we consistently underestimate and underuse. The nonconscious mind can take in huge amounts, more information than our conscious mind is capable of dealing with at any given moment – and this is not generally acknowledged in standard methodologies which teach just the information that the conscious mind can handle. Most methods present about ten new words in a lesson. This is a very limited and limiting way of teaching. In Suggestopedia, we might present 800 words in a lesson. Some of this is presented through peripheral material, such as wall posters. We don’t necessarily draw attention to it, but the non-conscious mind picks up the information, and then it comes to conscious awareness when students need to speak. We absorb information into the non-conscious mind and apply it with the conscious mind. Suggestopedia is therefore not about imposing knowledge on the students – and certainly not through methods such as hypnosis, which limit their freedom. It is about freeing them up to learn. SN So what is the real Suggestopedia, or Desuggestopedia? GL There are certain elements which need to be in a course in order for it to be called Suggestopedia, but the key element at the heart of Suggestopedia is the suggestion or desuggestion which is the basis of its name. 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. Everything in conventional methods, including the surroundings in which people learn, adds to this impression – and this is what I want to ‘desuggest’. The deliberate impression given by Suggestopedia, by comparison, is that learning is fun and easy – which is the suggestion in the name. We give much more material than in a traditional class, with the clear assumption that students will be able to learn it without difficulty. SN So two key elements are the positive suggestion that learning is easy, and giving large amounts of material? GL Yes, large amounts of material at a level appropriate to the age and interests of the students. This method works for both children and adults. SN You said that the chairs and music weren’t important, but I had previously understood that they were an essential part of the method. GL What is essential is that the students feel relaxed and happy. (This is what I mean by relaxation – they are relaxed because there is no pressure to speak or to do anything stressful, and also no homework, by the way.) With adults it can be helpful to learn in surroundings which do not remind them of school, which is why we often have comfortable chairs in pleasant surroundings. Music too can help people concentrate better on the texts, and we always use classical music as the background to what we call the active and passive concerts. The music does not have magical properties, and I regret responding to requests from people for the music I used in my classes. Suggestopedia is also nothing to do with anything that has been written about the Mozart Effect. We do use classical music – the impression of quality is important – rather than rap or modern pop music, and nothing with words that will interfere with listening to the texts. Dr Gateva – who was also an opera singer – was particularly instrumental in introducing aspects of art and music to the method, which all add to the feeling of quality. SN So what is special about the active and passive concerts? They are the first thing most people think of when they think about Suggestopedia. GL They are a way of exposing students to a large amount of authentic language in context – the non-conscious mind needs enough input for it to be able to make sense of the patterns of the language. In the active concert, the students are encouraged to follow the text. The translation is written alongside, so at all times students understand what they are reading and hearing. In the passive concert, they just listen to the words with the music. The texts are then exploited to bring the language to active awareness through the use of songs and games. SN So music and the active and passive concert are crucial parts of Suggestopedia? GL Not necessarily. They are one way of bringing a large amount of material to the attention of the students, but if there are other ways that work as well, these could also be considered Suggestopedic. The important thing is that students are presented both with the global picture of language in context and that they explore the detail and are given the opportunity to activate the material. SN Songs and games are used in many language classrooms. Is there anything special about the way they are used in Suggestopedia? GL In Suggestopedia they are some of the ways – along with acting out short scenes in a new personality – in which students activate the language. But when songs and games are used, they are an integral part of the approach, they are not offered as something extra to give people a rest from the hard business of learning. Instead, they reinforce the message that learning is easy and pleasurable. But a lot of thought goes into which songs and which games to use, and when they are introduced. There is nothing random about Suggestopedia, and I think sometimes people think that if they just play games and sing songs, then people will learn. SN And what is the significance of people taking on another personality? GL It frees people to try out different ways of behaving which reflects the new understandings they will get from learning a new language. And it gives the implicit message that this is something fun. SN It’s becoming clear that teachers need to be specially trained to teach Suggestopedically. GL Yes. The behaviour of the teacher,the voice of the teacher, everything the teacher does has an impact on the students and their learning, and this is something you can’t learn from books. In our school in Sofia we only use the best teachers. In fact, 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. They must be highly trained in the method, they must know their subject extremely well and they must know how to structure the material so that students can learn it. This is what gives them prestige or authority. SN So authority is not about being authoritarian? GL Absolutely not. In fact it is also important that the teachers love their students. You treat people you love in a very different way from people that you don’t love. The best teachers feel this degree of love for their students, and this is something that you can’t fake and which demands that teachers have a high degree of self-esteem and emotional maturity. Teachers must also have high expectations of students. It has been proven that students perform better when teachers genuinely think that they are capable of doing well. This is known as the Pygmalion effect. SN So the teacher is the key person in the classroom? GL Absolutely. Teachers can do a huge amount of damage to their students – if they have low self-esteem themselves, or low expectations of their students, poor understanding or knowledge of their subject, or if they just don’t like students. These people should get another job. Second-rate teachers should never be allowed near students – especially children! Students need and deserve excellence. SN Thank you, Dr Lozanov. Susan Norman, a longtime EFL teacher and teacher trainer, has written more than 40 books on learning and language learning, and was Editor of ETp for three years. For the past six years she has been Co-director, with Hugh L’Estrange, of SEAL. |
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