Pimsleur Method

Dr. Pimsleur's discoveries helped to build the very effective Pimsleur method of learning languages. Here are the main points his research discovered:

The mechanism in the brain that converts unintelligible human sound into language.

How the brain naturally stores the language in long term memory (important for the recall of vocabulary and grammar).

How the brain flawlessly recreates the language as speech (important for the sound and articulation of a foreign language).

How the words spoken by others are recognized and understood (important for the comprehension of a foreign language).

He used these discoveries to create his formula for learning a foreign language through sound. His audio books are all produces using this exact forumla that makes learning a language a oprocess that happens to a great part in the unconcious of the mind and nearly all by itself. Listening to his language learning audio books will train your brain to regognize a new language!

Paul Pimsleur worked also as Professor of Education and Romance Languages at The State University of New York at Albany. There he held a dual professorship in Education and French. Paul Pimsleur was a founding member of the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages. He did research on the psychology of language learning and in 1969 was Section Head of Psychology of Second Languages Learning at the International Congress of Applied Linguistics.

He concentrated his research on understanding how we learn languages. He was especially interested in the organic learning of children who speak a language without knowing its formal structure. In his experiments, he studied the learning process of groups of children, adults, and multilingual adults.

This research was finally resulted in the Pimsleur language learning system. His books, articles and audio books had and still have influence on theories of language learning and teaching.

In the period from 1958 to 1966, Pimsleur reviewed previously published studies regarding linguistic and psychological factors involved in language learning. He also conducted several studies himself. This lead to the publication in 1963 of a coauthored monograph, 'Underachievement in Foreign Language Learning', which was published by the Modern Language Association of America.

Through this research, he identified three factors that could be measured to calculate language aptitude:

• verbal intelligence
• auditory ability
• motivation

Pimsleur and his associates developed the Pimsleur Language Aptitude Battery (PLAB) based on these three factors to assess language aptitude. He was one of the first foreign language educators to show an interest in students who have difficulty in learning a foreign language, while doing well in other subjects. Today, the PLAB is used to determine the language learning aptitude or even a language learning disability among secondary school students.