TEXT C In order to get your point
across in your target language, you have to learn plenty of words. How do you
set about it Dr. Paul Meara, who lectures in applied linguistics, believes
there are lots of different ways of learning words. "Generally,
anything you do with the words which actually makes them yours rather than just
abstract things which appear in a book or on a record will almost certainly help
you to learn them. So, for example, writing them down is better than reading
them. Putting them on bits of paper and sticking them up around your house is
better than just looking at them in the page of a book. Saying them out loud is
better than reading them quietly. Anything which actually gets you to use them
would probably help." Encouragement and nurturing in the
students and belief in their ability to learn is one of the central tenets of a
relatively new approach. It’s called Accelerated Learning and it’s an offshoot
of an idea that began in Bulgaria. Michael Lawlor runs a language school for
business executives, teaching foreign languages to the British, and English to
foreigners. He’s currently testing this system to see if he can incorporate it
into his teaching program at his school. The main principle is to tap the
students’ emotions as well as their intellects and, to begin with, to get them
to visualize themselves as successful communicators in the language they’re
learning. "They can actually create a very clear mental picture
of themselves say in five year’s time, in the country where the language is
spoken, interacting with the people. They can also boost their own confidence as
learners by recreating past successful learning situation. Many people fail in
learning a language because their minds get calmer and they provide their brains
with oxyge. We teach them to sit properly so that they don’t lose energy and
maybe to have some simple physical movements to keep their energy up. All these
things are part of the learning process." ’The course work is
based on puzzles and games and above all on bilingual dialogues, so there’s no
fear of not understanding. As the grammar is introduced, the rules are put into
rhyming couplets to make them easier to remember. This method is all about
reaching into the under-used resources of mind and memory. After a class, the
students have a concert session when they hear the dialogue they were working on
against a background of baroque music. Michael Lawlor explains why they used
baroque music. "Dr Lazanov in Bulgaria, in his original
experiments, found that baroque music produced a state of relaxed awareness,
which is now known more generally as the alpha state. If you take the large
passages or the adagio passages from largo music, you find that they correspond
more or less to the slowed-down speed of the human heart--about 60 beats to the
minute. So we’re helping people to slow down their body rhythms. The mind then
becomes more receptive and open to passive learning, to listening. So that’s why
music of this kind is important. But it also, of course, touches the emotions.
The music will induce a state of pleasurable expectation and if we can link the
emotion of pleasure with learning, then we’re making a very valuable
contribution to the students’ affective, or emotional, involvement with the
learning process." The choice of a soft-spoken female voice to
present the language in accelerated learning techniques is also deliberate.
After all, who was it who taught you to speak your own language all those years
ago According to the passage, which is the most probable person to teach you to speak your own language
A.Your father. B.Your mother. C.Your soft-spoken female teacher. D.None of the above.