Currently, the requirements for the study of a foreign language are quite high, since one of the tasks facing the teacher is the formation of students’ communicative abilities. That is why the use of various methods and techniques allows you to open new learning opportunities. Neuro-linguistic programming (NLP) is one of the most powerful psychotechniques, which helps to change oneself and others in the most effective and elegant way. NLP emerged in the early 1970s and was the fruit of the collaboration of John Grinder, who was then an assistant professor of linguistics at the University of California at Santa Cruz, and Richard Bendler, a psychology student at the same university. Richard Bendler was also interested in psychotherapy. Together they studied the actions of three prominent psychotherapists: Fritz Perls, an innovator of psychotherapy and the founder of a school of therapy known as Gestalt therapy, Virginia Satir, a family therapist who managed to resolve such difficult family relationships that many other family psychotherapists found impregnable, and finally, Milton Erickson, the world famous hypnotherapist [1].
In the spring of 1976, Grinder and Bendler gave the name to their work – neuro-linguistic programming, a cumbersome phrase that hides three simple ideas. The “neuro” part reflects the fundamental idea that behavior originates in the neurological processes of vision, hearing, smell, taste, touch and sensation. We perceive the world through our five senses, we extract the “meaning” from information and then follow it. Our neuroscience includes not only invisible thought processes, but also our visible physiological reactions to ideas and events. One is simply a reflection of the other on the physical level. Body and mind form an inseparable unity, a human being. The “linguistic” part of the title indicates that we use language to streamline our thoughts and behavior and to communicate with other people. “Programming” refers to the ways in which we organize our ideas and actions to get results [2].
NLP distinguishes the following levels of learning and development:
– environment (external opportunities or restrictions on activities, place, time and material conditions necessary for its implementation);
– behavior (specific steps, actions or operations necessary to achieve the goal);
– abilities (a system of cognitive maps, plans and strategies, criteria for selecting and evaluating specific actions);
– beliefs and values (the motivation and choice of the general direction of activity, taking into account the existing abilities, goals and conditions; the answer to the question “why?” Regarding this activity and its psychological reinforcement);
– identity (the awareness of a person of his role, the answer to the question “who?” Regarding this activity);
– mission (understanding of its task within the framework of a larger system, of which a person is a part – families, groups, etc.)
The application of this concept to the context of leadership in education allows you to notice different levels or styles of leadership, depending on the focus of the teacher’s attention in the implementation of the educational process – providing the necessary conditions, behavioral competence (skills), development of abilities (training and in a wide range), education of the individual and etc [3].
In NLP, a lot has been said about the various ways of structuring experience. One of the presuppositions of NLP is: “Experience has its own structure.” At the same time, as we have already noted, it is believed that people differ in the dominant channels of perception, storage and transmission of information. So, according to some (unverified) data, the visual channel predominates in 40 % of people, in 40 % – the auditory channel, in 20 % – kinesthetic.
In recent years, a sea of various materials has appeared for the study of foreign languages. And any person (especially who decided to study his first foreign language) is often not sure where to start this way: buy a textbook, audio, video course, or even go to courses. Full knowledge of a foreign language at the level of your mother tongue implies that, when communicating with you, they will not be able to distinguish you from “their own”, as if you were growing up in a country whose language you are learning from infancy. The only thing that can give you the color of your skin or facial features when dealing with carriers is, but, as you understand, this goes beyond our competence. Thus, full-fledged knowledge of a foreign language implies a complete understanding of the language in the vast majority of situations and its correct use also in the vast majority of situations; in both cases, first of all – oral, but, of course, written (compare with the native language). Here it is necessary to emphasize one important point: a full-fledged proficiency in a language includes the ability to understand, the ability to speak and write in a given language, but not the ability to explain certain linguistic phenomena.
With regular lessons on studying a foreign language with maximum efforts, your vocabulary a year later will be at least 10-12 thousand words (of which more than half are active vocabulary). When reading modern literature or watching a modern film, we are not immune from the fact that the writer or actor uses some rare words, expressions, special terms, or we are faced with some social reality that has not yet been encountered while learning the language. And believe me, if you really want to qualitatively understand oral and written speech in a foreign language, not one of these 10 thousand will be superfluous. Sometimes there are articles where the figures are cheerfully given, which, they say, actively carriers in such and such language use only 500/1000/2000 words, so guys learn this 1000 words, and that’s all – you know the language. The figure, of course, is seductive, but, having only 1000 words, do not expect that you will understand well films, television, radio programs and even more so fiction or the press. Thus, after reaching the optimum goal, the level of proficiency in a foreign language will approximately correspond to the level of your teenager’s native language of sixteen from an intelligent family who, at the age of 11-12, immigrated with his parents abroad. Of course, after immigration, the family continued to speak their native language. Thus, you will have the correct pronunciation, you will have a tremendously developed sense of the language, you will become easy to express yourself in it, but to fully master the language you will lack vocabulary, plus you will not be familiar with some of the social realities of the country of the language being taught. But, as you understand, this can be quickly typed by reading literature containing the necessary vocabulary, as well as watching television news, serials, and films “for volume”. Here I will make a reservation: maybe the language will drag you down so much that in a year you will have time to read and become familiar with the social realities of the country of the language being studied in a sufficiently large volume and achieve full-fledged knowledge of a foreign language.
This is the minimum necessary to achieve the goals of the optimum program. Here I proceed from the assumption that a person can really be physically busy (you need, for example, to study at a university, earn money to feed a family). If you are not sure that you can find one hour daily for classes, I advise you to think three times before you begin to learn any foreign language. If we imagine language learning in the form of a car race, then any decrease in the intensity of classes (less than one hour per day, skipping classes) is not even a brake on language learning, but a 180 ° turn and riding in the opposite direction. If your language classes are irregular, then you will not “reach”, and you will only hang out at the beginning of the distance or even near the starting line. Or, for example, such an analogy: imagine that learning a language is like swimming along a river against a stream. The slightest loss of pace – and blows you back. DO NOT SWIM ! Maybe, of course, you will then overcome the same distance a little faster – you learned to swim, but you still have to overcome it, no matter how cool. By the way, the exact same thing applies to your native language: without active use, the process of forgetting a language is inevitable. On the other hand, this time – one hour per day – can be increased, and without limit. With the right motivation and a good selection of interesting materials, your desire to study the language will be so strong that you do not want to break away from classes [4].
In NLP there are three main representative systems: visual (visual), auditory (auditory), kinesthetic (sensitive). Through these three systems, a person receives 99 % of the information from the surrounding world (they also emit the olfactory-hustatory system, but I will not dwell on it). There is an important point. Take, for example, these three situations. The first situation: stand in front of the door and look at it – in this case, you receive an external visual signal from the outside world. Another situation: remember the color of the door in your room. In this case, the brain also receives certain information, though from itself, and this is an internal visual image. Third situation: imagine what you would look like with red hair. In this case, the brain again receives information (again from itself), which is also an internal visual image, but this is a constructed image in contrast to the previous, recalled, visual image. The same can be done for a different modality, for example, the audio one. Suppose you hear music on the radio – this is an external audio signal. Now you remember your favorite song – this is an internal recalled auditory image. Can you imagine further how your favorite song, played in an accelerated pace, sounded, is an internal constructed auditory image.
Perception positions
There are three main positions of perception. Suppose you are talking to a friend. The first position: you see the process of communication with your own eyes, you hear it with your own ears, you are experiencing the process of communication with your senses. The second position: you put yourself in the shoes of a friend and imagine what he can see, hear and feel during the conversation. Finally, the third position: you imagine how you and a friend look from the outside, how your dialogue sounds to someone third.
Consciousness / Subconscious
The term “consciousness” means everything that your attention is directed to at the moment. The subconscious is what is in memory, as well as those parts of your life experience that you are used to and which you don’t pay conscious attention to at the moment. For example: you walk down the street, in one hand – a bag, you remember the events of yesterday. To rearrange the legs, you do not exert the slightest effort of your conscious attention, nevertheless do it correctly, “on the machine”; you do not pay attention to the fingers of your hand, clutching the handle of the bag, nevertheless they hold it tightly. Let us take as an example the speech in the native language: you do not think about where to put the subject and predicate, how to verb one or another verb. The processes of building sentences occur unconsciously, naturally. Virtually any complex skill that a person possesses is realized unconsciously. For example, a professional musician, when performing a work he has learned, does not think about where to put his index finger at one time or another, which key to press, he is excited by other – creative – tasks. It is not necessary that the skill that you unconsciously develop as a result of a step-by-step conscious understanding of its component parts, such as occurs when you learn to solve quadratic equations using a math textbook or learn to print using a 10-finger blind method using a self-guide. Sometimes the unconscious skill can be acquired without the participation of consciousness. Suppose you talked for a long time with a person who has a habit of saying a parasitic word like “as it were”. After some time, you can include this little word in your speech, although you have never paid conscious attention to it either in the speech of this person or in your own. We can also give an example: a child learns his native language and as early as three years says: “This is a girl. I see girls. Surely none of the parents explained to the kid that the “girl” is a feminine noun, of the 2nd declension, so the ending changes in the accusative case. Skill correctly incline nouns child has acquired unconsciously.
Anchors
Has it ever happened that you hear a familiar song, and its melody, words cause you to recall specific situations? Or, looking at a photo of your school, do you suddenly remember a physics lesson in 7th grade? Both the song and the photo in this case are anchors for you, that is, external (most often) stimuli that cause you to have any feelings or make you remember any visual and / or auditory images. Unlike visual (photography) and audible (song) anchors, there are kinesthetic anchors. For example, if a person who is in a joyfully excited state presses his hand on his knee, then this state will “anchor”. After some time, when you need to make yourself excited, you just have to press your knee in exactly the same way.
Associated / dissociated image
Suppose you swim in a pool. Associated image: you see, hear, feel directly while swimming. Dissociated image: you imagine yourself floating in a pool, that is, you see how this person swims, how he waves his arms; this person is you.
Сondition
A state is a combination of the neurophysiological characteristics of an organism at a given point in time. There is a state of total immersion in something, absolute involvement (for example, in reading a textbook, in a game of tennis). In the state of “reading a textbook”, you are unlikely to be able to play tennis well, and in the state of “game of tennis”, you are unlikely to be able to tell anyone convincingly something. When learning a language, you will need special states, and we will talk about it again. For example: Bandler and Grinder. What allowed them to learn quickly? Why did others fail to grasp the actions of a genius, but did they succeed? The secret is HOW they learned the behavior of a genius: they copied the actions of a simulated person! Thus, the basic scheme looks like so: saw + heard + repeated [5].
As we clearly see from the abovementioned, NLP techniques help us acquire the foreign language in a more effective way. Therefore, the teachers of English should take into account the efficient NLP techniques to boost the learners’ productivitiy.