Suggestopedia as a method of teaching language

Nowadays a teacher should be creative in using different kinds of methods for teaching a particular language. They have to choose an appropriate method to transfer the knowledge because they will find different situations and different students in class. 

Generally, students would not be able to believe that they could be successful in learning language. This lack of motivation has made students do not have confidence to speak in the target language because they do not want to make mistakes. Moreover, they find difficulties to recall the previous lesson, such us memorizing the new vocabularies. This situation encourages teacher to be creative and to use an effective method on teaching.

One of the most  effective methods is suggestopedia. Suggestopedia is an effective comprehensible input based method with a combination of desuggestion and suggestion to achieve super learning. The most important objective of suggestopedia is to motivate more of students’ mental potential to learn and which obtained by suggestion. Desuggestion means unloading the memory banks, or reserves, of unwanted or blocking memories. Suggestion then means loading the memory banks with desired and facilitating memories. 

Key Features of Suggestopedia

1. Comfortable environment

In suggestopedia method, the classroom is not the same as common classrooms. In the classroom, the chairs are arranged semicircle and faced the black or white board in order to make the students pay more attention and get more relaxed. In addition, the light in the classroom is dim in order to make the students’ mind more relaxed. 

1. The use of music

One of the most uniqueness of this method is the use of Baroque music during the learning process. Baroque music, with its 60 beats per minute and its specific rhythm, created the kind of relaxed states of mind for maximum retention of material. It is believed that Baroque music creates a level of relaxed concentration that facilitates the intput and retention of huge quantities of materials. Baroque music helps the students to reach a certain state of relaxation, in which the receptivity is increased (Radle, 2008). The increasing of learning potential is put down to the increase of alpha brain and decreasing of blood preasure and heart rate. The use of music also depends on the expected skill of the students: listening, grammar, pronunciation, discussion, etc

-Peripheral Learning

The students learn English not only from direct instruction but also from indirect instruction. It is encouraged through the presence in the learning environment of posters and decoration featuring the target language and various grammatical information. They are changed everyday. By doing this, the students can learn many things undirectly in the classroom or outside classroom. For example, students can produce simple sentence by using the posters or grammatical information on the wall

-Free Errors

In the teaching learning process, students who make mistakes are tolerated, for example in pronouncing the word. The emphasis is on the content not the structure. Grammar and vocabularies are presented and given treatment from the teachers, but not dwelt on.

-Homework is limited

Students reread materials given in the classroom once before they go to sleep at night and once in the morning before they get up.

-Music, drama and art are integrated in the learning process

To sum up, there are a lot of methods that can be used to help students ameliorate in the the learning process but suggestopedia is considered as the key to student’s mind. The more they enter they enter the world of colors, music, role play etc the better they learn the language. 

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