Minggu, 21 Maret 2010

Desuggestopedia

DESUGGESTOPEDIA

The originator of Desuggestopedia :
• Georgi Lozanov ( a Bulgarian psychotherapist )
• “ Learning is a matter of attitude, not aptitude.“

Georgi Lozanov ( 1988 ), Foreign Language Teacher’s Suggestopedic Manual

The meaning of suggestopedia
• Suggest => desuggest
• This method puts importance on “ desuggesting limitations on learning

Classroom set-up
• Armchair
• Light is comfortable
• Everything is bright and colorful
• Posters
• Music
• The teacher speaks confidently;
• The teacher leads the class in various activities involving the dialog, for example, question-and-answer, repetition, and translation;
• The teacher should integrate indirect positive suggestion ( there is no limit to what you can do ) into the learning situation.

Fine arts
• One of the ways the students’ mental reserves are stimulated is through integration of the fine arts-music, drama, or paintings.

Enjoy your learning
• The teacher gives the students the impression that learning is easy and enjoyable.
• It’s desire that the students achieve a state of ‘infantilization’ so they will be more open to learning.

Choosing a new identity
• This enhances students’ feeling of security and allows them to be more open.

Positive suggestion
• Direct suggestion
• Indirect suggestion

Active concert
• Teacher will introduce a story as related in the dialog and call the students’ attention to some particular grammatical points that arise in it, she reads the dialog in the target language. Music is played. The teacher begins a slow, dramatic reading, synchronized in intonation with the music. The music is classical and the teacher’s voice rises and falls with the music.

Passive concert
• In the phase, the students are asked to put their scripts aside. They simply listen as the teacher reads the dialog at a normal rate of speed. The teacher is seated and reads with musical accompaniment.

Primary activation
• The students playfully reread the target language dialog out loud, as individuals or in groups. Students are asked to read the dialog in particular manner : sadly, angrily, and cheerfully.

Creative adaptation
• The students engage in various activities designed to help them learn the new material and use it spontaneously. Activities particularly recommended for this phase include singing, dancing, dramatizations, and games.

1. The goals of teachers who use Desuggestopedia are :
• To accelerate the process of learning a foreign language for everyday communication.
• To desuggest learners’ psychological barriers.
• To activate learners’ ‘paraconscious’ part of the mind.
• To help students eliminate and overcome the barriers to learning and increase their communicative ability.

2. The teacher’s role :
• Authority => being confident and trustable.
• Security => affording a cheerful classroom atmosphere.

The students’ role :
• Relaxed => following the teacher’s instruction easily.
• Role play => enjoying in the new identity freely.

3. Some characteristics of the teaching / learning process are :
• Classroom atmosphere => decoration & posters.
• A new name and occupation => to dispel fear or anxiety
• Hand Out => for advanced students
• No test, no assignment
• Conversation with translation in music => to activate the ‘whole brain’ of the students
• Games, songs, role play => to strengthen the material

4. The teacher initiates the interactions in two way—
1) The teacher to a group of students
2) The teacher to only one student

The students respond through—
1) Nonverbal actions
2) A few target language

Student-student interaction—role play

5. The feelings of the students dealt with by
  • Relaxed—psychological barriers are desuggested.
  • Confident—the target language comes naturally.
--success is obtainable.
  • Secure—assumption of a new identity

6. – Language itself is the first of two planes in the two-plane process of communication.
- Nonverbal factors also influence the linguistic message.
- The use of the fine arts is important in Desuggestopedia classes.

7. – Vocabulary is emphasized.
- Grammar is dealt with explicitly but minimally.
- Speaking communicatively is emphasized.

8. The role of the students’ native language is
• Native language is used to make the meaning of the dialog clear.
• As the course proceeds, the teacher uses the native language less and less.

9. The evaluation accomplished by
Evaluation usually is conducted on students’ normal in-class performance, not through tests.

10. The teacher respond to student errors by
Errors are corrected gently, with the teacher using a soft voice.

Suggestopedia is a teaching method developed by the Bulgarian psychotherapist Georgi Lozanov. The method has been used in different fields of studies but mostly in the field of foreign language learning.

Lozanov says that by using this method one can teach languages approximately three to five times as quickly as conventional methods. However, it is not limited to the learning of languages, but language learning was found to be a process in which one can easily measure how much and how fast something is learned.

The theory applied positive suggestion in teaching when it was developed in the 1970s. However, as improved, it has focused more on “desuggestive learning” and now is often called “desuggestopedia.” Suggestopedia is used in six major foreign-language teaching methods known to language teaching experts (the oldest being the grammar translation method.) The name of Suggestopedia is from the words “suggestion” and “pedagogy”. Many discussions and misunderstanding have caused this name because people connects the words “suggestion” to “hypnosis”. There are many different definitions for the word “suggestion”. When Dr. Lozanov chose this word, he was thinking about the English meaning : TO SUGGEST = TO OFFER, TO PROPOSE (BUT THE STUDENTS ARE FREE TO CHOOSE).

Desuggestopedia is an approach to education whose primary objective is to tap the extraordinary reserve capacities we all possess but rarely if ever use. This method utilizes techniques from many sources of research into how best we can learn.

Dr. Georgi Lozanov has demonstrated that through a carefully “orchestrated” learning environment including most importantly a specially-trained teacher, the learning process can be accelerated by a factor of three to ten times enjoyably. Such result are possible through the proper use of suggestion. The suggestive-desuggestive process allows students to go beyond previously held beliefs and self-limiting concepts concerning the learning process and learn great quantities of material with ease and enjoyment.

Lozanov’s “ Suggestopedia” is :


  • Not Hypnosis
Lozanov, once a hypnotist himself, now strongly opposes against use of hypnosis. He has realized the danger of hypnosis and being hypnotized ( Lozanov 1978 ). In the process of refining his own Suggestopedia with Evelina Gateva, he has removed all elements that may induce “hypnotical states” of mind.
Lozanov defines hypnotic situation as being taken one’s freedom and creativity away by a hypnotic dictator. Every teaching method that uses “order”, “guidance”, “Monotonous intonation” and “ monotonous rhythm” may cause hypnotic states.

  • Not Superlearning
The authors of “Superlearning” have never been trained by Lozanov. The book was written with limited information acquired from a short observation of Lozanov’s experimental research. Hence, there is a lot of misunderstandings in the book.

  • Not NLP ( Neuro-Linguistic Programming)
Lozanov denies any kind of manipulation on ones personality, even if it would “program” however positive or optimistic way of thinking. Suggestopedia sees ”programming” is a product of “dictation” and “ manipulation” that, like hypnosis, inhibits freedom of persoanality.

  • Not using a reclining chair, or a sofa
A suggestopedia class uses a room with a central round table and ordinary chairs surrounding the table. It never uses reclining chairs to lay down students and make them listen to a teacher’s voice. Such an activity may cause hypnotic states.

  • Not using “breathing exercise”
  • Not using “visualization exercise”
Lozanov calls such an exercise as “guided fantasy”. He regards this kind of guided fantasy in which people are forced to visualize some image is a hypnosis.

  • Not using “alpha wave” enhance exercise
  • Not using “slow baroque” music in the concert reading

Suggestopedia uses baroque music pieces in the second or “passive” concert session. However it never uses a “slow baroque” or a music piece written as “adagio”. It is simply because Suggestopedia does not want students to fall asleep in the concert session. Rather, it uses faster and livelier pieces to stimulate a whole brain.
In the first or “active” concert session, it uses even more lively pieces of classical music. The music list includes a quite dramatic piece such as Beethoven’s piano concerto No. 5.

  • Not using rap music in the concert reading
Suggestopedia uses the power of the selected (scientifically proven) pieces of classical music because of its artistically harmonized colorful melody, rhythm, and emotion that stimulates all levels of mind as it changes from time to time. Music dominated by a monotonous rhythm and beat, such as rap music, may cause hypnotic states.

  • Not only a group of teaching techniques
Teaching techniques are meaningless if applied without full comprehension of the theory. For example, giving a set of concert reading sessions in the traditional setting language classroom doesn’t work.

  • Not able to teach without a teacher
Suggestopedia uses a lot of emotion in the classroom to stimulate all levels of human “personality” that works in coordination of consciousness and paraconsciousness. Self study can never receive such a global stimuli.

  • Not selling tapes, CDs, Videos, and bio-feedback devices or any mechanical materials as such
Dr. Lozanov denies all the “mechanical” stimuli. Monotonous and meaningless stimuli generated by a machine that can cause hypnotic states.

Sources, History, Initial Results


The artful use of suggestion as a means of facilitating the learning and communication process is, of course, and has always been, a part of nearly all effective teaching and persuasive communication.

For more than 20 years he has been experimenting with accelerative approaches to learning, has founded the Institute of Suggestopedia in Sofia, Bulgaria and has authored the book : Suggestology and the Outlines or Suggestopedia ( Gordon and Breach, New York, 1997).

In his early research Lozanov investigated individual cases of extraordinary learning capacities etc., and theorized that such capacities were learnable and teachable. He experimented with a wide range of techniques drawn from both traditional and esoteric sources, including hypnosis and yoga, and was able to accelerate the learning process quite drammatcally.

Dr. Georgi Lazanov of the Institute of Suggestology in Sofia, Bulgaria is, together with his colleagues, the originator of these techniques. SUGGESTOLOGY is the study of the power of suggestion which can be verbal, non-verbal, conscious or unconscious.

SUGGESTOPEDIA is the study of these suggestive factors in a learning situation.

Lozanov maintains that a suggestopedic teacher spends most of the time de-suggesting the students, i.e., freeing them from any nonfacilitating influences from their past.

Purpose and theory


The intended purpose of Suggestopedia was to enhance learning by lowering the affective filter of learners. Suggestopedia is a system for liberation, the liberation from the “preliminary negative concept regarding the difficulties in the process of learning” that is established throughout their life in the society. Desuggestopedia focuses more on liberation as Lozanov describes “desuggestive learning” as “ free, without a mildest pressure, liberation of previously suggested programs to restrict intelligence and spontaneous acquisition of knowledge, skills and habits.” The method implements this by working not only on the conscious level of human mind but also on the subconscious level, the mind’s reserves. Since it works on the reserves in human mind and brain, which are said to have unlimited capacities, one can teach more than other method can teach in the same amount of time.

In Practice


The lesson of Suggestopedia consisted of three phases at first : deciphering, concert session (memorization séance), and elaboration.

Deciphering
: The teacher introduces the grammar and lexis of the content.

Concert session (active and passive) : In the active session, the teacher reads the text at a normal speed, sometimes intoning some words, and the students follow. In the passive session, the students relax and listen to the teacher reading the text calmly. Music (“Pre-Classical”) is played background.

Elaboration : The students finish off what they have learned with dramas, songs, and games.
Then it has developed into four phases as lots of experiments were done : introduction, concert session, elaboration, and production.

Introduction
: The teacher teaches the material in “a playful manner” instead of analyzing lexis and grammar of the text in a directive manner.

Concert session (active and passive ) : In the active session, the teacher reads with intoning as selected music is played. Occasionally, the students read the text together with the teacher, and listen only to the music as the teacher pauses in particular moments. The passive session is done more calmly.

Elaboration
: The students sing classical songs and play games while “the teacher acts more like a consultant.”

Production
: The students spontaneously speak and interact in the target language without interruption or correction.

How to Teach using Suggestopedia


Traditional books cannot be used in a Suggestopedic class since they fail to present the content and grammar following the function of the human brain. The way they present information is not according to the real way the human brain processes information. The whole book has to be adapted to be used in a Suggestopedic class. It is hard work but the final result are worth it.
In Brazil, there is a teacher who developed a whole teacher training course to apply and use Suggestopedia using traditional books. He teaches how to adapt and create a new Suggestopedic book to be used in Suggestopedic classes. The training also teaches the teachers how to conduct an intensive course in English or in any other foreign language using the newest development of Suggestopedia – Desuggestopedia.

Major Concepts and Features


1. Mental Reserve Capacities (MRC)


Among the examples of such capacities are the ability to learn rapidly and recall with ease large quantities or material, solve problems with great rapidity and spontaneous ease, respond to complex stimuli with facility and creativity. There is general agreement among researchers that the human being uses 5-10% of his/her brain capacity at the most. The primary objective is to tap into the MRC.

2. Psychological “Set-Up”

Our inner set-up operates when we encounter any situation – entering a school, being confronted with an opportunity – consulting a physician – as examples. Our inner, unconscious set-up is extremely basic and important to our behavior and to our survival – and it can be extremely limiting, for it can imprison us in unconscious, consistently patterned responses which prevent us from experiencing and exploring other alternatives – which might be far more desirable and beneficial to us. Prevailing social norms, instilled in us by all our social institutions, including family and schools, are the main carriers and enforces of the beliefs and responses which contribute to the formation of our inner set-up. The power of the influence of our unconscious set-up is very great, and any significant lasting change or overcoming of previous limits will necessarily involve a change in our unconscious patterns of response.

3. Suggestion

Suggestion is the key which Lozanov found to penetrate through the “set-up” and stimulate the mental reserve capacities. Even more, through suggestion we can facilitate the creation of new, richer patterns of conscious / unconscious responses or new (set-ups) : “Suggestion is the direct road to the set-up. It creates and utilizes such types of set-ups which would free and activate the reserve capacities of the human being.” ( Lozanov : The Key Principles of Suggestopedia”, Journal of SALT, 1976,p.15)
There are two basic kinds of suggestion : direct and indirect. Direct suggestions are directed to conscious processes, i.e., what one says that can and will occur in the learning experience, suggestions which can be made in printed announcements, orally by the teacher, and/or by text materials. Direct suggestion is used sparingly, for it is most vulnerable to resistance from the set-up.
Indirect suggestion is largely unconsciously perceived and is much greater in scope than direct suggestion. It is always present in any communication and involves many levels and degrees of subtlety. Lozanov speaks of it as the second plane of communication and considers it to encompass all those communication factors outside our conscious awareness, such as voice tone, facial expression, body posture and movement, speech tempo, rhythms, accent, etc. Other important indirect suggestive effects result from room arrangement, décor, lighting, noise level, institutional setting- for all these factors are communicative stimuli which result in what Lozanov terms non-specific mental reactivity on the paraconscious level (at the level of the set-up). And they, like the teacher and materials can reinforce the set-up, preserve the status quo, or can serve in the desuggestive-suggestive process.
Everything in the communication/learning environment is a stimulus at some level, being processed at some level of mental activity.

4. Anti-Suggestive Barriers

The first task of suggestology and suggestopedia is to remove people’s prior conditioning to de-suggest, to find the way to escape the social norm and open the way to development of the personality. This is perhaps the greatest problem suggestology is confronted with, since the person must be ‘convinced’ that his potential capacity is far above what he thinks it is. The individual protects himself with psychological barriers, according to Dr. Lozanov, just as the organism protects itself from physiological barriers :

• An anti-suggestive emotional barrier which rejects anything likely to produce a feeling of lack of confidence or insecurity : “This anti-suggestive barrier proceeds from the set-up in every man.”

• An anti-suggestive barrier of man’s rational faculty which through reasoning rejects suggestions it judges unacceptable : ‘This barrier is the conscious critical thinking’. But, very often this barrier is the camouflage of the emotional barrier.

• An ethical barrier, which rejects everything not in harmony with the ethical sense of the personality.

“These anti-suggestive barriers are a filter between the environmental stimuli and the unconscious mental activity. They are inter-related and mutually reinforcing, and a positive suggestive effect can only be accomplished if these barriers are kept in mind. The overcoming of barriers means compliance with them. Otherwise suggestion would be doomed to failure. “ It is clear that the suggestive process is always a combination of suggestion and de-suggestion and is always at an unconscious or slightly conscious level.”

Three barriers to Suggestion


1)
Logical-critical
“That’s not possible “
“Others may be able to do that, but not me.”

2) Affective-emotional
“ I won’t do it. It just makes me feel uneasy. I can’t explain it really.
“ I’d rather not, thank you.”

3) Ethical
“ I really think that’s slightly dishonest.”
“I don’t think it’s fair.”

5. Means of Suggestion

Suggestive authority

Lozanov defines it as “the non-directive prestige which by indirect ways creates an atmosphere of confidence and intuitive desire to follow the set example”. Authority in its positive, suggestive sense, is communicated through our “global” presence, through all our non-verbal as well as verbal signals.
When we communicate in a simultaneous, congruent manner that we are confident with the material we are teaching, that we love what we are doing, that we respect the students who have come to learn, that we know they can learn it, and that we take delight in teaching – when we can communicate these things with our voices, facial expressions, posture, movement and words, we will achieve an invaluable rapport with our students, will arouse expectancy and motivation, and will establish a suggestive atmosphere within the student’s mental reserve capacities can be tapped. ( Self-fulfilling prophecy)

Infantilization

In suggestopedia we do not talk about infantilization in the clinical sense of the word, nor of infantility. Infantilization in the process of education is a normal phenomenon connected with authority (prestige). Infantilization in suggestopedia must be understood roughly as memories of the pure and naïve state of a child to whom someone is reading, or who is reading on his own.

Intonation

Intonation is strongly connected with the rest of the suggestive elements. The intonation in music and speech is one of the basic expressive means, with formidable form-creating influence and potential in many psycho-physiological directions. “Learning is state of mind dependent”. When varying your voice you ”reach” different “states of mind”.

Concert pseudo-passivity (concentrative psychorelaxation)

An important moment in suggestopedia. The artistic organization of the suggestopedic educational process creates conditions for concert pseudo-passivity in the student.

Successful classroom atmosphere

For a successful classroom atmosphere, Lozanov maintains these three elements should be present :

PSYCHOLOGICAL

A nurturing, supportive atmosphere in which the student feels free to try out the new information, be inventive with it, make mistakes without being put down, and, in general, enjoy the learning experience.

EDUCATIONAL

The material should be presented in a structured fashion, combining the Big Picture, Analysis and Synthesis. Every moment should be a didactic experience even when the learning process is not that apparent.

ARTISTIC

The classroom should not be cluttered with too many posters and unnecessary objects, otherwise we don’t see them. We go into overwhelm. Good quality pictures should be displayed and changed every few days. Music can be played as the students enter the room, and during the breaks. Plants and flowers add to a pleasant atmosphere. If the chairs are arranged in a U-shape, there is a better communication possible between the teacher and students and among the students themselves.

Music

After conducting numerous controlled experiments using a wide variety of music, Lozanov concluded that music of the Classical and Early Romantic periods was most effective for the first presentation of material to be learned. The music of Hayden, Mozart and Beethoven is dramatic, emotionally engaging, and ordered, harmoniously structured. It stimulates, invites alertness, and its harmony and order evoke ease and relaxation. For the second concert presentation of material Lozanov found that Baroque music was especially suited. The music of Bach, Handel, Vivaldi, Telemann, Corelli (among others) has a less personal, more rigorously structured quality, providing a background of order and regularity which supports very well the more straight-forward presentation of material during the second concert.

Tidak ada komentar:

Posting Komentar