Report from the Field – Chris Stoltz

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5 thoughts on “Report from the Field – Chris Stoltz”

  1. …this guy was trying to see if people could pick up grammar stuff unconsciously….

    Unless I read Krashen wrong, he has shown this. I don’t know where, but it is what I get Krashen to be saying. I think it would be in one of the corollaries to the Comprehensible Input Hypothesis where he talks about i + 1 (from Wikipedia):

    …when enough comprehensible input is provided, i+1 is present. If language models and teachers provide enough comprehensible input, then the structures that acquirers are ready to learn will be present in that input. According to Krashen, this is a better method of developing grammatical accuracy than direct grammar teaching….

    I wonder if the researcher knows about the fundamental premises of Suggestopedia, which this experiment resembles. By having the subject focus his conscious mind on something other than the language, it all went straight into the unconscious, where languages are acquired. Had Mark not been drawing, he would have been thinking “about” the language during the experiment and nothing would have happened. That’s all this guy was doing in this experiment, bypassing the conscious mind so that real acquisition could occur as per what we already know from Krashen.

    This guy was able to reach the deeper mind with comprehensible input because the drawing distracted the conscious mind, which is the enemy in language acquisition. Even though it doesn’t sound very compelling or even interesting, Mark was able to retain it. His grammatical accuracy was a result of the fact that, indeed, real grammar is gained in just this way over thousands of hours – the unconscious mind makes the gains that we see in our classrooms precisely because of the absence of discrete grammar instruction that is directed at the conscious mind, which you’d think by now people would get doesn’t work.

    The problem was that the Mark probably didn’t give much of a rip if he learned the language or not and also that only one half an hour of CI ain’t much. No wonder the gains fell off after 24 hours. Both of those facts weren’t looked at in this experiment.

    I worked extensively with Suggestopedia and even applied it to high school sports teams with some stunning results over the years – too long a story. Bottom line is my research with it in sports had exactly the same results. Your golf score would drop by as many as one stroke per hole, but if you listened to the program I created for golfers after 24 hours, it didn’t work. It had to be within 20-24 hours.

    Related: https://benslavic.com/blog/2012/03/12/using-calming-music-in-fvr/

  2. The experimenter was focused just on short term and just on gut feel. Too bad it was 8 years ago and Mark can’t remember the guy’s name. Ben, you should write a post about suggestopedia sometime…sounds interesting.

  3. It resembles hypnosis but isn’t. But the students lay down on the floor and their brain waves change from 22 cycles per second down to 14 (alpha state). In the alpha state they are blotters for whatever goes in. So we could teach a verb once and it would be there. When I was testing this 25 years ago a kid went from SC to Atlanta Fulton County stadium to watch a Braves game. In line to buy his ticket he was flooded with French that I had done in his class (a summer school class) in this way that week. That started my application of it to sports. I worked with Heathwood Hall’s (Columbia) baseball team, who had not been able to get more than three hits per game all season. They did a session with me and knocked out 15 hits. I worked with two of my students, the QB and his favorite WR on the football team, the morning of the Homecoming football game. Down and in patterns all night for about 170 yards, ten yard pops on the numbers all night. It freaked me out. It freaked everybody out. One 22 minute session and you are a superstar. I worked with a soccer team at Myrtle Beach HS against rival Socastee, the #1 ranked team in the state which had had only four goals scored on them all year. They came into my classroom an hour before the game and went out and put up a 4-2 win. I couldn’t believe. I said, “This shit works!” So I finally pissed off enough parents with the lie down on the floor and go into a meditative state while I read off French verbs to your kid deal and was told to stop. It really is another example of how in a private business Suggestopedia would be fantastic. But you have to know how to do it. Brain waves changes are not something to play around with. One time a guy, a teacher who wanted to do a session was lying there as we were about 15 minutes into the visualization and someone banged on the door. Not good! But yeah, it was fun and it works, but under proper supervision with proper training. You work with the breath, the breath slows down the heart rate to 60 from 72 and that kicks in the 14 cycles per second which is where the super learning happens. In lieu of that, now I do the gesturing.

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