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Baba Vanga |
Baba Vanga was a blind Bulgarian mystic. She is quite well-known among people who are into the weird and wonderful world of ‘parapsychology‘. She’s famous for her Nostradamus like predictions which had a ‘80% accuracy rate‘. She is said to have predicted, among other things the 9/11 attacks, the election of a Black president and the 2004 boxing day Tsunami.
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SEAL – a lozanov inspired org. |
All of this information was available in the 70’s and yet Suggestopedia was generally treated fairly credulously. It receives serious coverage in works by Krashen, Larsen-Freeman, and many, many others. In Tomlinson’s ‘Materials development in language teaching’ a whole chapter is devoted to writing and grammar presentation in ‘the Lozanov method.’ The author Hansen, tells us that these days (1998) it’s easier to understand here Lozanov was coming from since “quantum science has become more familiar” meaning we can perceive in “multidimensional” ways. Even today you can find published papers (here, here and here for instance) examining the effectiveness of the method and even the ELTJ recently had an article citing Lozanov.
Baba Vanga died in 1996 but almost every year an article appears talking about one or more of her predictions and trying to link it to some current event. Lozanov died in 2012 but his influence lives on in suggestopedia courses, books and in articles. Usually defenders of Suggestopedia say we should take the ‘good stuff’ and leave the rest. I suppose we could do that with Vanga too. I don’t believe in seeing into the future or magic powers but suggestopedia does seems to have something of a charmed life and I don’t predict that changing any time soon.