Designed Immersion |

Designed Immersion™ is a method of language instruction based on the research and theories of Dr. Georgi Lozanov, Dr. Stephen Krashen and on our own teaching experience at Pars Omni over many years.

At Pars Omni we have taught Spanish and English to thousands of students and delivered dozens of language programs for companies and government departments in the United States, Canada, Mexico, Malaysia, Japan, South Africa and Austria. We worked directly with Dr. Lozanov for many years and we're very familiar with Dr. Krashen's theories as well.

All of our classes are delivered by instructors trained in Designed Immersion™ and our latest offering (the Spanish Fluency Membership) includes a special training for Members in Designed Immersion™.

Professor Georgi Lozanov, M.D. (1926 - 2012) was a Bulgarian psychiatrist and psychotherapist, brain physiologist and educator. He created what he called the science of Suggestology and its application to education – Suggestopedia. Suggestology is "the science of tapping man's reserve capacities in the sphere of both mind and body".

He developed teaching methods and materials for adults and children in Bulgaria during the 1970's. By 1978 there were 17 primary schools converted to his methodology as well as an adult foreign language institute. His methodology was officially observed by a 25 expert commission from UNESCO in 1978, evaluated as a superior teaching method and recommended for application all over the world. You can read the Working Document for the Expert Group here.

Stephen Krashen (b. 1941) is professor emeritus at the University of Southern California. He moved from the linguistics department to the School of Education in 1994. He is a linguist and educational researcher.

Krashen is well known for his contributions to the fields of second-language acquisition, bilingual education, and reading as well as for introducing various hypotheses related to second-language acquisition, including the acquisition-learning hypothesis, the input hypothesis, the monitor hypothesis, the affective filter, and the natural order hypothesis.

In 2012, the Washington Post published a Krashen article titled "The wrong and right way to learn a foreign language". In it he takes issue with some advice by a State Department staffer. The staffer advised "study grammar very hard, drill vocabulary every day, and force yourself to talk" in order to learn a foreign language. Krashen points out that this advice flies in the face of decades of research. Krashen writes:

[Instead], we acquire language when we understand what people tell us and what we read, when we get “comprehensible input.” As we get comprehensible input through listening and reading, we acquire (or “absorb”) the grammar and vocabulary of the second language.