ABSTRACT
Educational psychologists were not the only individuals to conduct or direct scientific research into Suggestopedia in the early 1970s. Language teachers figured prominently in early research efforts and, in point of fact, Marina Kurkov is generally acknowledged to be the first person in the United States to apply Suggestopedia (or what she termed “a modification of Lozanov’s suggestopedia”) to the teaching of beginning Russian at the Cleveland State University in the fall of 1971. When comparing the results achieved by the two classes involved, an experimental and a control group, it was found that the experimental group covered twice as much material in the same amount of time as the control group. The results corroborated Dr. Lozanov’s contention that “in a given amount of time students who are taught by his method learn more, faster, with less effort and retain their knowledge better than other students” (Kurkov, 1977, p. 27). Other, early language teaching researchers into Suggestopedia such as R.W.Bushman and Elizabeth Philipov also found that Suggestopedia (or elements of Suggestopedia) improved the learning of foreign languages.1
