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Tell Me About the Lozanov Method | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Learning Techniques, Methods & Strategies |  | |
| Rollo the Cat Groupie United States Joined 6035 days ago 77 posts - 90 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: Italian, Russian, Ancient Greek | Message 1 of 20 01 July 2008 at 3:13pm | IP Logged | ||
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Has anyone here ever taken a course based on the Lozanov method or has anyone trained as an instructor in the
Lozanov method? I am wondering how successful you were as a student or teacher. Specifically, I am also interested in how many times a dialogue, or concert session, is repeated. What is behind the strange intonation the instructors use sometimes? How much actual grammar do the students get? 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| TerryW Senior Member United States Joined 6358 days ago 370 posts - 783 votes Speaks: English* | Message 2 of 20 01 July 2008 at 5:56pm | IP Logged | ||
Yes, or at least it claimed it did. In the late 80's I ordered it from one of those Sky Mall magazines on an airplane flight. The ad for this "Accelerated Learning" course said that 15 cassettes were the same course used by the U.S. government to teach diplomats (yes, you guessed it), and that it includes another 15 "Memory Cassettes" based on the famous method developed by Dr. Georgi Lozanov, blah, blah, blah. This was pre-internet, and those ads are so appealing (like Rosetta Stone ads today), I figured I'd have fun building on the 3 years of German I took in High School. The 1st 15 cassettes were FSI Basic German, which came with the blue cover government book. And the 15 matching "Memory Cassettes" were some of the key phrases from the corresponding unit, spoken softly by a professional speaker over a background of Baroque music (Pieces like Pachelbel Canon in D) Nice writeup in Wikipedia on Pachelbel Canon (including the score for you musicians): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pachelbel_canon The idea was that the music is relaxing, and Lozanov proved you retain more if you use Baroque music for a background. I did find that I could understand the sentences without translating, but then again, after doing FSI maybe I would have anyway, plus it was only several selected sentences spoken at a moderate pace. ("In zehn minuten sind Sie da." Hey I remember one!) And it was something like the English whispered before the spoken German, then German-only over the music background, then the music loud with the German very softly in the background, nonsense like that. So I think it can help to use Baroque music in the background while studying, but I really doubt that it will let you soak up material like a sponge. I'm sure the Lozanov method included a lot of other techniques, but that was it for this course. The course was called "Accelerated Learning Techniques." Much later, I bought a Spanish version of the same course (copyright early 90's), and it didn't have any baroque music at all, but a *lot* of extra material for the Memory Tapes. The 1st Memory tape was a motivational talk by Dr. Robert W. Blair, so I think it was the predecessor to his "Power Glide" series, because descriptions of that are pretty similar to the Memory Tapes in the Spanish course. Edit: I now remember that the 90's course did have 1 music tape (maybe with subliminals, don't remember for sure) that you were supposed to play before studying. I never bothered with it.) Edited by TerryW on 01 July 2008 at 6:37pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Rollo the Cat Groupie United States Joined 6035 days ago 77 posts - 90 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Italian, Russian, Ancient Greek | Message 3 of 20 01 July 2008 at 7:13pm | IP Logged | ||
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Thank You Terry. I believe however that those tapes--I do remember them from SkyMall--were only loosely based
on the Lozanov method. I have read statements by teachers of the Lozanov method where they dismissed those courses. From what I have been reading though, it is very hard to pin down just what the method is. Lozanov himself seemed to say different things a different times. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Casey Newbie United States Joined 6614 days ago 26 posts - 28 votes Speaks: English* | Message 4 of 20 30 July 2008 at 1:08pm | IP Logged | ||
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. Edited by Casey on 12 August 2008 at 8:54am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Rollo the Cat Groupie United States Joined 6035 days ago 77 posts - 90 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Italian, Russian, Ancient Greek | Message 5 of 20 30 July 2008 at 3:09pm | IP Logged | ||
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Thanks for the links Casey. I am not sure I would totally dismiss Suggestopedia.
Here is a series of videos on Suggestopedia I found on YouTube. Interesting and I suspect that if the method is to be successful, it requires a skilled teacher. http://youtube.com/watch?v=yX4JFEUgqlg 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Casey Newbie United States Joined 6614 days ago 26 posts - 28 votes Speaks: English* | Message 6 of 20 04 August 2008 at 12:17pm | IP Logged | ||
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. Edited by Casey on 12 August 2008 at 8:54am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Cainntear Pentaglot Senior Member Scotland linguafrankly.blogsp Joined 6012 days ago 4399 posts - 7687 votes Speaks: Lowland Scots, English*, French, Spanish, Scottish Gaelic Studies: Catalan, Italian, German, Irish, Welsh | Message 7 of 20 04 August 2008 at 2:58pm | IP Logged | ||
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Casey,
I recommend you pick up a copy of The Pianist's Talent by Harold Taylor, because there's a fourth effect at play here that doesn't get the mainstream recognition it deserves. I tentatively call this the Thiberge effect, and it relates directly to the old teaching mantra of "do as I say, not as I do". Raymond Thiberge earned his crust as a piano teacher in Paris at the turn of the 19th/20th century. In those days, Paris was the world capital of piano playing and tuition, and Thiberge was fascinated and perplexed by the massive differences in technique as taught by the different conservatoires. Each of these schools were staffed by big names, and each had their star graduates famed across the world, and these few were held up as proof of the superiority of their method. (Each school had their failures, too, but they obviously had no talent, so it can't have been the schools fault.) A lot of these differences were with regard to tension in the muscles of the arm. "Hold the front of the arm tense," some would say, while others would insist that the tension should be in the back of the arm. So Thiberge decided to study under as many of the top names as he could. Now, Thiberge was blind, so he had to hold the professors' hands to "watch" them, which led him to a simple discovery: none of these teachers had any tension in their arms whatsoever. Furthermore, he examined the students: the successful students also had no tension in their arms, whereas the "failures" were actually doing exactly has been told. So the Thiberge effect as I define it is that A) no-one is really aware of what they are doing B) in the absence of such knowledge they will assume they did what they were told to do. This failure can been seen in many fields -- I also read about it in a book called Total Immersion (see the Total Immersion website). This isn't a language program -- no, it's swim coaching. The old rules of swimming front crawl were: 1) Don't twist your body as you swim -- only move your arms. 2) Move your arms in an S-stroke. 2) Keep your fingers pressed close together. In this case it was gold medal winners who were held up as proof of the efficacy of the coaching. Then they invented underwater chase-cams and we could see that the "good students" were again ignoring the rules and letting instinct guide them to the most efficient way of moving. The ones who failed -- the ones tagged as either physically inferior or workshy -- were doing exactly as they had been told. I saw it in cello tuition -- whenever I see an orchestra on TV they hold the bow the way I wanted to hold it, but my teacher (along with every other teacher on the planet) wouldn't allow me to hold it that way. I was discussing this with a Scottish Dance teacher, and he said how he had found none of his students could grasp the "pas-de-bas" step, so he stopped teaching it, and started studying the movements of all the top competition dancers. He realised that they weren't doing it the way it was taught, then he realised that he wasn't doing it the way he'd been told either. From then on he started teaching what he'd done all along, rather than what he'd been told to do and suddenly everyone he taught it to picked it up easily. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| leosmith Senior Member United States Joined 6551 days ago 2365 posts - 3804 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Tagalog | Message 8 of 20 04 August 2008 at 3:07pm | IP Logged | ||
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Casey, what is your appraisal of the L-R system?
1 person has voted this message useful |
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