The effects of suggestopedic elements on qualitative and quantitative measures of language production

This was a 10-week time-series investigation of a class of 12 students with the same teacher carrying out the teaching for both the experimental and control condition and the same students exposed to both treatment conditions. The question of central interest in this study was whether Suggestopedia affects more sophisticated language skills than recall, and both quantitative and qualitative measures were included to address the criticism that Suggestopedia affects memory skills alone. Year 10 students’ recall, comprehension, word production, fluency, accuracy, writing quality, transfer skills of grammatical items, and understanding of grammar rules were tested once a week. Long-term retention rates for recall were also checked at the end of each four-week period. The findings suggested that Suggestopedia does in fact have the potential to positively affect sophisticated language skills such as transfer of structures and creative writing. Compared with performance during the control Phase, results showed that during the experimental Phase students performed equally as well on tests of comprehension, accuracy and understanding of rules, and significantly better on tests of recall, word production, fluency, writing quality and transfer of grammatical items.