History of the Internalization Method

The Internalization Method dates back to the late 1970s when I discovered the Library for Foreign Literature in Moscow (wiki,  site).

Before that, I only had access to graded readers with an English-Russian glossary at the end, so there was no real need for a dictionary.

I was, and still am, an avid reader, so I naturally wanted to widen my choice of available books to read. That is why, when I was told about this source by a classmate at the Moscow Engineering Physics Institute, I jumped at the chance to get my hands on some ‘real’ books. (As it turned out, few of the books the library offered were ‘real’ – most were bound photocopies of the real McCoy.)

It turned out to be a veritable treasure-trove of reading matter for the bookworm that I am – I was on cloud nine. However, the books were indeed ‘real’ in that they were exact copies of the original, not adapted for easy reading in any way and had – naturally enough – no glossary at the end.

To attend uni, I had to commute a long way every day, riding a train for 45 minutes and the tube for nearly as long. It goes without saying that I wanted to read while commuting, but could hardly lug around a big heavy dictionary, so I had to do without.

It was quite intimidating to tackle a real English-language book at first, but I rose to the challenge and, despite not knowing many of the words, I bit the bullet and plunged right in, driven by my desire to read ‘real’ books in English. What happened was that I started reading without translating because I simply couldn’t: there were too many unfamiliar words and not enough context to translate them all into Russian.

So I relaxed and just took it all in, letting the words I saw sink into my consciousness without making a conscious effort to understand what each of them meant, but focusing on the larger picture and trying to visualize the scenes I read about in my mind’s eye. Somehow I managed to make sense of what I saw on the page, and gradually all the bits of the puzzle started falling into place and I found myself enjoying what I was reading and the process itself.

But the discovery that I made in so doing and that put me on track to what eventually became the Internalization Method was the realization that, having put the book away after reading it for some time, I continued thinking in English about what I had read and even about other things, too!

Since then I’ve been trying to find all possible ways to encourage and stimulate my stream of consciousness in English. I call this principle ‘think to learn’ rather than ‘learn to think’ (speak, read, write etc), which is what conventional teaching of languages is all about.

More to come. Stay tuned. Read this post in Russian here.