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Sarah and I just had an article published in HLT (Humanizing Language Teaching). It’s titled “Language Patterns and Embedded Suggestions for Motivating Learners.”
About 8 years ago, I started to deliberately incorporate NLP language patterns into my EFL patterns, and it has made a radical difference in levels of student motivation. Over the last few years, we have introduced some of these ideas at language teaching conferences around Japan including JALT, PanSig, and ETJ. This current article is a pretty straightforward use of the Milton Model – a standard NLP model based on the language patterns of Milton Erickson.
We are also involved in several research studies to provide more quantitative evidence to support the use of these language patterns. One of these focuses on reading speed. Over the last year, I have been running an experiment with two classes based on systematic measurement of their reading speed. One class is the control group, and I try to avoid using NLP patterns and stick to ‘traditional’ pedagogy (that is surprisingly difficult when you are very familiar with NLP) and the other class gets heavy use of the patterns. Although the full results won’t be available until February, it is already clear that there is an enormous quantitative difference between the two groups as compared to the original baseline reading speeds. We’ll be sharing the results as they become available.