In order to get your point across in your target language, you have to learn plenty of wor

ds. How do you set about it？ Dr. Paul Meara, who lectures in applied linguistics, believes there are lots of different ways of learning words.

"Generally, anything you do with the words which actually makes them yours rather than just abstract things which appear in a book or on a record will almost certainly help you to learn them. So, for example, writing them down is better than reading them. Putting them on bits of paper and sticking them up around your house is better than just looking at them in the page of a book. Saying them out loud is better than reading them quietly. Anything which actually gets you to use them would probably help." Encouragement and nurturing in the students and belief in their ability to learn is one of the central tenets of a relatively new approach. It's called Accelerated Learning and it's an offshoot of an idea that began in Bulgaria. Michael Lawlor runs a language school for business executives, teaching foreign languages to the British, and English to foreigners. He's currently testing this system to see if he can incorporate it into his teaching program at his school. The main principle is to tap the students' emotions as well as their intellects and, to begin with, to get them to visualize themselves as successful communicators in the language they're learning.

"They can actually create a very clear mental picture of themselves say in five year's time, in the country where the language is spoken, interacting with the people. They can also boost their own confidence as learners by recreating past successful learning situation. Many people fail in learning a language because their minds get calmer and they provide their brains with oxyge. We teach them to sit properly so that they don't lose energy and maybe to have some simple physical movements to keep their energy up. All these things are part of the learning process."

'The course work is based on puzzles and games and above all on bilingual dialogues, so there's no fear of not understanding. As the grammar is introduced, the rules are put into rhyming couplets to make them easier to remember. This method is all about reaching into the under-used resources of mind and memory. After a class, the students have a concert session when they hear the dialogue they were working on against a background of baroque music. Michael Lawlor explains why they used baroque music.

"Dr Lazanov in Bulgaria, in his original experiments, found that baroque music produced a state of relaxed awareness, which is now known more generally as the alpha state. If you take the large passages or the adagio passages from largo music, you find that they correspond more or less to the slowed-down speed of the human heart--about 60 beats to the minute. So we're helping people to slow down their body rhythms. The mind then becomes more receptive and open to passive learning, to listening. So that's why music of this kind is important. But it also, of course, touches the emotions. The music will induce a state of pleasurable expectation and if we can link the emotion of pleasure with learning, then we're making a very valuable contribution to the students' affective, or emotional, involvement with the learning process."

The choice of a soft-spoken female voice to present the language in accelerated learning techniques is also deliberate. After all, who was it who taught you to speak your own language all those years ago？

Many people fail in learning a language because ______.

A．they are too old

B．they lack language ability

C．they lose their own confidence

D．the teachers are not good enough