1. Why don’t you use textbooks?
2. Why is there no homework?
3. Why isn’t this methodology used in the high schools and colleges and universities?
4. Why do you develop listening and speaking skills before reading and writing skills?
5. How can you teach the grammar if all you do is develop listening and speaking skills?
6. What is wrong with teaching and learning the four basic language skills together from the beginning?
7. Why do you call your program training instead of teaching?
8. How did this system of training and learning come about?
9. How can you assess listening comprehension development if you do not teach reading and writing?
10. What is the size of the classes?
11. Can you teach other languages this way?
12. Why don’t you have levels of learning like all the other language schools and programs?
13. Do you have a placement test?
14. How can I be sure that what I am learning is going to stay with me over time?
15. How many words can I expect to learn from your 100 and 200 hour programs.
16. What will I be able to do with my Spanish once I have finished with your program?
17. What can a learner of English expect to do once he or she has finished with your program?

1. Why don’t you use textbooks?
Textbooks rely on reading and writing and homework to teach the grammar of a language. What textbooks do preschool children use to learn their native language? Textbooks become a way of teaching about the language, and that information cannot transfer into speaking in the language with any efficiency. Language is naturally learned by mapping its sounds to the images they represent, and textbooks cannot accomplish that.


2. Why is there no homework?
Homework in the academic sense requires reading and writing, which would require a textbook of some sort. This becomes counter-productive in learning the language naturally.


3. Why isn’t this methodology used in the high schools and colleges and universities?
The textbook is the principal resource for teaching languages in these institutions. All of the grammar is taught through reading and writing. It provides pre-planned lessons and exercises, and it gives a teacher a lot of comfort to know what comes next in the book. The teacher becomes an explainer of what is provided in the text, and tries to package that information in a variety of innovative ways. Nearly all teachers believe that grammar must be taught through reading and writing. When a system comes along that teaches all of the grammar through listening comprehension and verbal fluency development, and without any textbooks or homework, there is a collective and universal gasp of heresy. Their focus on language learning is to teach reading and writing, not comprehension and speaking. We have taught over 14,000 students with this system, and the primary interest for more than 95% of them is to be able to understand and speak the language, and not learn to read and write it.


4. Why do you develop listening and speaking skills before reading and writing skills?
Everyone on the planet can understand and speak a language, but not everyone is literate. The natural process of learning a language is to understand it first and then speak it. You cannot speak more than you understand, so it follows that comprehension must come first. Some languages do not have a writing system, yet they are just as complicated in grammar as those which do. Listening and speaking skills are naturally acquired since we are genetically programmed to learn a language. Reading and writing are artificial language systems, and listening and speaking are natural language systems.


5. How can you teach the grammar if all you do is develop listening and speaking skills?
Where does grammar come from? It certainly doesn’t come from textbooks. Perception is the source of all grammar. Everyone on the planet can speak and understand at least one language, but not everyone can read or write it. Some languages have no writing system, and in fact, literacy is a fairly recent development among humans. We train you in the language you are learning by systematically associating the sounds to the images they represent. Absolutely all of the grammar of the language can be taught this way. We don’t talk about the grammar nor do we teach grammar rules in the traditional sense.


6. What is wrong with teaching and learning the four basic language skills together from the beginning?
Everything. The vast world of academia has adopted this approach, and everything it does regarding language teaching and learning revolves around teaching the four skills–reading, writing, listening, speaking– from Day One. The reasoning is to provide the student a “well-rounded” base of knowledge of the language. The problem is that there is no scientific evidence anywhere that supports the four-skills approach, and it is certainly not how languages are learned naturally. Language is the only course taught in the schools for which we are genetically programmed to learn. How it is taught there does not reflect in any way the process by which we actually learn a language naturally.


7. Why do you call your program training instead of teaching?
Training is the most appropriate term because students are learning to map the sounds of the target language over the images they represent. The instructor is the Trainer who creates the images and situations in the classroom in order for the mapping to occur. The student is being systematically trained to process the spoken language into meaning at the moment it is heard without translating. The student’s ear is being trained to distinguish perceptually where one sound ends and another begins. The perception-language association is the basis of all instruction, and the student is actively involved in this process during every moment in the classroom. Teaching is what teachers do, and they interpret and transmit the information from the textbook to the student. There is no training going on in the traditional language classroom.


8. How did this system of training and learning come about?
Eric Anderson began to question the reasoning for using textbooks in the language classroom in 1978. While in Panama in 1980, he began to explore teaching all of the grammar of English without textbooks. From there, he designed a system based on using perception as the medium of instruction. Soon it became apparent that language is the systematic association of sounds to images, that listening comprehension is the process whereby sounds are converted into mental images, and speaking is the process of converting the mental images into the corresponding sounds. Reading and writing have no place in this basic design.


9. How can you assess listening comprehension development if you do not teach reading and writing?
We have designed a listening comprehension assessment system that is extremely accurate, and is the only one of its kind in the world. It assesses the person’s ability to map the sounds of the language over the situations that are created in the classroom during the test. We have given this test to over 12,000 students, and we are able to accurately measure students’ language acquisition by correlating the results from the tests to their comprehension and verbal performance. It is so accurate that if on the first day of class a person scores 80% or higher on the English version, for instance, then that person speaks and understands English well enough to be able to function in the workplace without having to take our Natural English Training program. People learn the grammar of a language without having to learn to read or write it, and that learning can be assessed in a very objective and quantitative manner.


10. What is the size of the classes?
Class enrollment is kept to under 20 students, and 15 to 18 students is the ideal number. Most situations that are created in the classroom involve 3 to 6 students, so each person has many opportunities to participate and learn from others during a class period. One-on-one instruction is counterproductive because language is learned within a community of people.


11. Can you teach other languages this way?
This program started out with English, then it was adapted to Spanish, and now we have the Natural Language Training program for French, Russian, German, Italian, and Japanese. We are currently developing it for Chinese and Arabic. We believe that we can teach any language in the world this way. We are looking into having it applied to the Native American languages which are disappearing at an alarming rate. These languages can be preserved without difficulty by adapting the linguistic material to our natural language training paradigm.


12. Why don’t you have levels of learning like all the other language schools and programs?
Levels of learning fit well into the part-of-speech paradigm of traditional language learning programs. All of the grammar is taught through reading and writing, with accompanying homework exercises. A student progresses from one level to the next, and that mobility is determined by how well a student performs on the written tests and exercises. Levels are organized around grammar, and the textbooks progress from what they consider “easy”grammar to “difficult” grammar; however, there are no criteria that determine what is easy or difficult. We use perception as the medium of instruction in which we systematically train the student to understand the spoken language without translating and to speak it and be understood by native speakers. The training and learning is not broken down into levels because there are no reliable and scientific criteria for establishing levels. Each language program that we provide is one course with a starting point and an ending point.


13. Do you have a placement test?
We have no placement test because we have no levels of instruction. We have the Perception-Language Aptitude Test for each language that is given on the first day of class in order to establish a base line score. That same test is given upon completion of the listening comprehension component to measure the acquisition of the target language. Each course begins with a group of students who have had different exposures to the target language. After the listening comprehension development training, the group that was once heterogeneous in its knowledge, is now homogeneous, which is to say that everyone possesses nearly the same abilities. This allows the group to move on to the verbal fluency development phase of the program.


14. How can I be sure that what I am learning is going to stay with me over time?
You are learning the target language through the same process you learned your native language. What you learn from our program will stay with you much longer than if you had taken a traditional language course. If you are able to continue using the new language naturally, then it will stay with you. If you don’t use it, you will lose it, just like any acquired skill.


15. How many words can I expect to learn from your 100 and 200 hour programs.
We don’t measure learning progress by the number of words a student learns. Type and quantity of vocabulary vary according to the needs of each student, and the actual number of words also depends on the language you are learning. We give you the formula for using those words so that you can understand what you hear and speak and be clearly understood. In our 100-hour language programs for Spanish, French, Italian, Japanese, Russian, German, and Chinese, a student can reasonably expect to learn between two thousand and four thousand words, at the minimum. For the 200 hour English program, a student can be expected to learn between three thousand and five thousand words, at the minimum.


16. What will I be able to do with my Spanish, for instance, once I have finished with your program?
You should be able to travel to a Spanish-speaking country and do the things you want without the language being an impediment. You should be able to communicate more freely with your Spanish-speaking clients or patients or acquaintances. You should also be able to continue learning more Spanish naturally as you use it.


17. What can a learner of English expect to do once he or she has finished with your program?
Our English program is 200 hours long, and the student who completes the program satisfactorily will be able to successfully function on the job in English in terms of understanding and speaking the language. The student will also have much more confidence to initiate conversations in English.