Ground-breaking Language Research

"The teaching of languages could be revolutionised following ground-breaking research by Victoria University PhD graduate Paul Sulzberger."

This comes from an article on research being done on methods of teaching languages.

"Dr Sulzberger has found that the best way to learn a language is through frequent exposure to its sound patterns—even if you haven't a clue what it all means. "However crazy it might sound, just listening to the language, even though you don't understand it, is critical. A lot of language teachers may not accept that," he says."

The problem I have with this is that it is not so ground-breaking or revolutionary, except to the mainstream media and educational system. To them, 'researchers' are making groundbreaking discoveries, meanwhile people have been using these techniques for years now outside of formal education.

Polyglots like author and radio personality Barry Farber, linguists like Steve Kaufman (Lingq.com), language professors like Alexander Arguelles (ForeignLanguageExpertise.com) and others have been using and touting variations of these techniques for years. It just goes to show how slow to accept change the established educational system is.

Not to take anything away from Dr. Sulzberger, it's important, valuable and necessary work. If this is what it takes to get these techniques into mainstream education then great. Everybody wins.

But these techniques are already proven. I wish that mainstream media wouldn't be so slow to notice, and that the mainstream educational system wouldn't be so slow to put them into use. It would make us all so much better off.