6. The Genesis Of Accelerated Learning

Dr. Georgi Lozanov is Bulgaria's leading research psychologist. A medical doctor, he is now renowned for the breakthrough in education theory that led to Accelerated Learning.

Dr. Lozanov obtained his PhD for his work on the application of suggestion in the field of medicine and education. For his doctorate he spent months investigating the phenomenon of hypermnesia - photographic memory. He worked with people who had extraordinary mental powers - from a Russian who could multiply four figure numbers faster than a computer, to Indian mystics who could remember 10,000 verses word-perfectly. His conclusions and theories were built into a learning system that is radically different from any other.

The learning system that is now in daily use in hundreds of classrooms across Eastern Europe, the United States and Western Europe, is, of course, very different from the prototype developed in 1956 at the University of Sophia. The principles, however, have remained constant, even when translated from the Bulgarian culture to, for example, the United States.

When you walk into a Lozanov method class, you walk into a very different environment from that which most people associate with teaching. Let me describe a lesson we attended at the Lozanov Learning Institute in Washington.

A dozen people sit in comfortable reading chairs in a semi circle around the teacher. Behind him are the twin speakers of a large stereo music centre.

On the walls are colourful pictures of animals and familiar objects with the Spanish words for that object lettered faintly across them.

The teacher is master trainer Peter Kline. He smiles and announces that the method the class will use in learning Spanish is the method by which a test group of disbelieving visitors from UNESCO (United Nations Education and Scientific Cultural Organization) learned to recognise 1,200 new words of a foreign language in a single day!

The Lozanov method, says Kline, involves six main principles:

One - We have to de-suggest the idea that your ability is limited. To remove the negative mental blocks that cramp our natural learning ability. Those self-imposed limitations are a cultural legacy and paradoxically are produced by our school system! In place of these artificial limitations, we put the powerful and positive suggestion that learning is in reality easy, fun and enjoyable.

Two - We relax - because we know that relaxation creates the ideal condition of stress-free alertness, when information is rapidly and effortlessly absorbed.

Three - We create a mental map of the information we are going to learn. In the case of a language we go over the entire lesson first in English, so we know the story and what to expect and to provide a context we can relate to. Then we read it in Spanish to get the feel of it.

Four - We hear what is known as the "Active Concert". This is a reading of the Spanish text in a dramatic manner to the accompaniment of a specific type of classical music as a background. The music is mostly by Baroque composers like Corelli, Telemann, Haydn, Bach, Albinoni and Vivaldi. Music composed between 1700-1750.

The teacher's voice follows the rhythm of the music in a natural way - as if his voice were an instrument in the orchestra.

We follow the sound of the language and look at the words in a unique text book. The words are so laid out, that even while the eye is following the Spanish text, the English translation is in the peripheral vision of the reader - in other words he is subconsciously taking in both texts - the Spanish consciously, the English subconsciously, out of the "corner of his eye".

"This", explains Peter Kline, "is one of the visual subliminal elements. The music is the main audio route into the subconscious. We find we can access the further reaches of the subconscious better through art, because art involves the emotions. Harmony of form and colour music and rhyme, reach not only the heart but the mind - via a much shorter route than logical facts and arguments."

In fact the music works by activating the right brain and in this way the left and right brains are directly and independently stimulated. Sound and visual stimuli, your conscious and subconscious, "Super-liminal" and subliminal stimuli, are each involved to speed the information into the memory in a positive and enjoyable environment.

The brain is known to store information in a rhythmical way, so the use of rhythm as an external aid is entirely logical.

Bio-feedback expert, Dr. Budzynski, writing in "Psychology Today" confirmed Peter Kline's point -

"Apparently the right hemisphere processes verbal material better if it is coded in rhythm or emotion. When someone speaks in a monotone, only the verbal, dominant hemisphere is activated. If the speaker adds intonation, the nonverbal side starts to pay attention. The right hemisphere's language is not the logical content of what is said, but the emotions conveyed by how it is said. Lecturers, preachers, and politicians who are famous for the oratory know intuitively what to do with their voices to generate emotion and thereby persuade their audiences".

The medium is the message.

Five - After the Active Concert there is a break. Then the Receptive Concert takes place. It is so called because it requires that the student apparently makes no effort at all. In reality, however, an enormous amount of mental activity is taking place. Before the Receptive Concert the students are told "Relax in your chairs, close your eyes and just concentrate on the music". Now the music becomes the dominant factor and the words of the Spanish text are only just audible to the conscious mind. They are, however, perfectly understandable to the subconscious and thus the barriers of the conscious mind are neatly side stepped.

"The purpose of the receptive concert," says Peter Kline, "is to give you a familiarity with speech as normally used in
the language you are studying - its patterns and natural rhythms. You are relaxed, and the music creates an ideal mental state (alpha) for an effortless absorption of the material.

"The whole of the first lesson will bring about a coordination of left and right brain, in a synthesis that creates a quantum leap in learning speeds and retention. " "Just how much of a leap?" asks a student. Peter Kline answers that every Western Application has shown a significant gain in learning - from minimum of trebled learning effectiveness to as much as ten times faster. "Expect a fourfold increase" smiles Kline "and you will be pleased at your results. "

The class ends after a total of two hours. The posters and cards around the room have, again subconsciously, reinforced the lesson.

The next day begins with the sixth and final main element.

Six - After the deliberate intervention of a night's sleep, the next day's class starts with what is termed the Activations. These consist of a series of games, puzzles, and playlets devised to review the words learned the previous day, in an environment that is fun and deliberately childlike. Lozanov insists that a key to the method is to return to the way children learn before they go to school. It's not only stress free, it's characterised by high expectations of success. Mistakes, if they occur, are taken, correctly as a sign that the learner is deliberately stretching herself with new material. It's a sign of ambition and lack of fear.

One game that particularly impressed me used a ball! The teacher would throw the ball to the student to catch and simultaneously ask a question in Spanish. The students answered spontaneously as they caught the ball. Time after time they exclaimed "l was surprised I knew the words of the answer. They just popped up. " In fact the teacher was deliberately distracting the student's conscious attention by the act of catching the ball - and allowing the words, which were already stored in the subconscious, to surface. It was impressive proof that the memory
had indeed already been created.

The thinking behind the second day's Activation session is that the intervening night's sleep and dreaming will have allowed the brain to assimilate the new words. The next day review ensures that they are then `fixed'.

One cannot help but be impressed at the way everything in these Lozanov classes is co-ordinated to bring about "learning in the round".

The storyline of the lessons is dramatic because dramatic facts and stories with emotional associations are more easily remembered.

The pictures in the text book are expertly drawn because as Peter Kline points out "art aids suggestion". Additionally, individual pictures have the Spanish word lettered into the outline of the drawing. A picture of a lion for example has the word "leon" lettered into it.

Each student is assigned a Spanish name and character. It becomes a role to play. The theory is that when the student makes a mistake he makes it "in the name of his new Spanish alter ego". Consequently, the mistake is transferred to the new character, and does not in any way reflect on the student himself.

It is also noticeable that every single element of the class is positive. No criticism. Just encouragement. It is the sort of supportive atmosphere that a child normally learns in. Everything was focused to ensure effective stress free learning. Words, pictures and sound were all co-ordinated. Left brain / right brain activity was co-ordinated. Conscious / subconscious influences were co-ordinated.

The childlike joy of learning was married to the adult's store of prior knowledge.

The Lozanov method is holistic learning at a very refined level.

I asked Peter Kline what he felt was the secret of the method's success. I had already been told the facts of the success. Students normally learnt a language in a month, a seven times speed up in learning. A `norm' was to be able to recognise hundreds of new words a day, at 90% retention.

How was it done? His answer was revealing.

"Children learn spectacularly well up to the age of 5. They expect to learn. Everything is fresh, stimulating, exciting and easy. Children essentially teach themselves. From a sea of information that surrounds them, they pick out the pieces that interest them at the moment.

"They gradually build up a structure in their minds of how their own language works. They figure out the grammar for themselves. Vocabulary is built up as phrases in the context of a real life situation. No one gives them rules or lists of nouns.

"Then the learning curve falls rather dramatically. A funny coincidence. People are presented with information in a very different manner from how they learnt pre-school. How can they come into the world knowing absolutely nothing and learn a natrive language? With 100% success? With nobody teaching them in a formal way. Study that and you'll figure out the Lozanov method ".

That gave me pause for thought. Play is central to learning. It is a way of acting out things we need to explore. It is perhaps the daytime equivalent of dreaming. A dress rehearsal without the tension of the "serious" performance?

Children have fabulously creative imaginations. They are constantly exposed to new ideas so that their imagination is continuously stimulated. Yet as they grow older their innate ability to conjure up impressions and to remember seems to decline, in inverse proportion to their ability to reason in a logical manner.

The more we are taught the logical relationships between things, the "laws" of science or behaviour, the fewer the childlike leaps of imagination. We no longer feel so vividly - we concentrate on the maps, forgetting the countries they represent. The development of step by step logical thought patterns (left brain emphasis), seems usually to reduce the capacity to imagine vividly (right brain capability) and hence remember vividly.

A characteristic of children is their spontaneity, open mindedness and high expectation of enjoyment. It is an environment worth recapturing.

Kline encourages the expression of emotion in the classes - "You can't separate the intellectual from the emotional. In fact an emotional content to learning makes it easier to remember because people remember more in a higher state of arousal. The key to what we are doing is to distract the conscious mind and
`click' the information in when you're not looking!"

The introductory remarks that Peter Kline made in the lessons I visited, were completed by a videotape of one of the early Lozanov classes at his Institute in Sophia. The video was officially produced by UNESCO, who have welcomed the technique as an important advance in education. The following description of this film is taken verbatim from the North West Orient Magazine because it captures the flavour of the video tape so well.

"As the video tape begins the viewers see about a dozen, stiffly formal, male Russian government officials in sombre suits file into a classroom for their first exposure to French. From the outset the short, lithe woman who is the Lozanov instructor, speaks only in French and dramatises outrageously everything she says. The men sit like boulders as she acts out a lesson. Occasionally they glance nervously out of the corners of their eyes at each other.

The tape progresses to a time a few days later. The men are now in shirtsleeves and have begun to have a playful look about them. The instructor asks one question in French and throws him in inflated plastic ball. He answers in French and throws it back. By the next sequence, a few days later, the men are alI marching around the room after the instructor, swinging their arms back and forth exaggeratedly and singing a French song.

Finally, the men have had enough French instruction and are ready to initiate their own conversation. The tape advances further and suddenly we see one of the men on a stage pretending to be coming home for dinner. He issues a greeting in remarkably well accented French and the greeting is returned by another of the men, who is playing the first man's wife and is dressed in a short skirt, a blouse and a bandanna and is holding a plastic doll. Some spirited discussion ensues in fluent French, the gist of which seems to be (to the unschooled observer) that dinner is not ready. Why is dinner not ready? Because I spent all day taking care of the baby! The drama goes on, most remarkable for the fact that, not only are these men arguing in French, when they had no knowledge at all of it merely weeks previously, not only are they moving with great animation across the stage, when formerly they sat like stones, not only are they acting with the abandon of small children, but above all they all are immensely enjoying themselves.

There's something tremendously refreshing about the whole scene."

After the video tape ends, Peter Kline chose his words carefully, "Conventional language teaching is unnatural because the entire situation is artificial. The rigid and pedestrian progress from apparently easy words, to "more difficult passages" implicitly emphases that you can expect everything to get more difficult. Since you expect things to get more difficult, they do!

"Our techniques," he says, "mirror the child like learning process. You pick up the language and construct the structure for yourself.

"It's global teaching rather than piecemeal teaching.

"It requires you to dive in, initiate things, make mistakes, experiment. It's fun and will improve your general creative ability.

"It never gets more difficult than in Lesson 1.

"It's a holographic approach, not a linear approach - so if you don't figure out the way the language is constructed in Lesson 1 you can do so in Lesson 3 or 5, or whenever you're ready.

"Each new word is introduced in such a way that is meaning is made clear by the context in which it appears. Words are re-used often enough so that they quickly become familiar. Many more words of text are used to introduce new vocabulary than is customary in other foreign language courses.

"Thus one can relax and allow the brain to become familiar with the sounds of the words and gradually absorb their meaning. This is directly comparable to the way in which a child is exposed to its language. He gradually associates familiarsounds with meanings.

"In traditional learning a source of tension is fear of the unknown. An unfamiliar word becomes a threat. In this approach you are secure all the time because the meaning of the word is always immediately available. "

In all, I and my colleagues, spent several weeks at the Lozanov Institute in Washington with founder Carl Schliecher and with Peter Kline. We came away personally convinced that it worked. We had seen the students, their enthusiasm and their success.

But we are troubled by a number of questions.

1. How important is the music, and how does it work in the context of a Lozanov Accelerated Learning Course?

2. Where was the objective evidence and if the method worked so well, - why weren't more people using it. In fact, why wasn't everyone using it?

3. Our current educational system may not be perfect but surely they can't be accused of actually teaching us to accept we have less potential than we really have?

4. We were aware that great advances had been made in the last decade in understanding the brain and memory - did these developments validate Lozanov? Or could they be used to evolve an even better system?

The answers to those questions took three years to compile and involved visits to twelve countries but we are finally convinced we have a learning method that can benefit everyone, adult or child.
Let us look at those questions and the answers we found.