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In 2005, René Bastin, doctor of linguistics and international specialist in the teaching of language, creator and director of the Ceran centers (1975-2000), created Balingua SA in order to spread the Balingua® Method.
 | HISTORY |
Throughout his career in language instruction, René Bastin made two fundamental observations:
- for a beginner, learning a foreign language is usually difficult, slow and frustrating. Many people give up or feel incapable of learning a foreign language.
- a great many foreign language students devote as many as 1000 hours of learning time to studying a language at school. At the end of this period of study, despite all that they have learned, most of these students still cannot express themselves orally in a foreign language, nor understand a native speaker.
So René Bastin started to look for a language learning method specially designed to provide a solution to this kind of failure.
From 2000 to 2004, René Bastin studied the latest findings of linguistic theory, neurolinguistics and psycholinguistics. He also drew on the advice of Professor J.-A. Rondal, international specialist in psycholinguistics.
In 2004, guided by his 40 years of experience and his recent studies, he drafted the first Balingua® Method, in Lithuanian. Encouraged by the first results (in 3 hours, total beginners were able to create their first sentences in Lithuanian!), he went on to draft the Balingua® Method in Chinese, French, Spanish and Dutch.
In 2005, René Bastin founded the company Balingua SA in order to spread the Balingua® Method.
In 2005 and 2006, the Balingua® method was computerized and the online learning platform was created. The Balingua® method was adapted to serve multiple students online. The Balingua® Method was adapted for many other languages.
The Balingua Method was officially launched during a press conference in Brussels in January of 2007.
The Balingua company spreads René Bastin’s method in several different ways:
- online, via the e-learning platform www.balingua.com
- through language professors, who use the method in class
- through schools and language schools, public or private
- through businesses
- through licensing agreements: this is how the Japanese company Plato will produce, under license with Balingua®, an English language method on CD-ROM for the Japanese market.
The Balingua® Method suits all kinds of learning styles and is appropriate for all learners: adults (from 17 years of age), businesses, schools.
| AN INNOVATIVE CONCEPT |
The Balingua® Method represents a new methodological approach to language learning. It offers a totally different perspective from traditional methods, even those which are oriented towards self-expression and communication.
Supported by recent discoveries in linguistics, neurolinguistics and psycholinguistics, the Balingua® Method is based on the following principle: it is possible to learn languages based on what they have in common, whereas traditional methods unconsciously stress what is different between the mother tongue and the studied language. What languages have in common are fundamental neurolinguistic mechanisms. These amount to a linguistic “know-how” that the learner developed while learning his or her mother tongue. Without even being conscious of it, a beginner language student thus already knows a lot about how languages function, a knowledge that the Balingua® Method can rely on to help the learner more rapidly learn a new language.
The Balingua® Method is specially designed to:
- immerse the beginner student in the new language as quickly as possible
- activate the passive knowledge acquired at school that the learner has never managed to use orally
- reactivate forgotten knowledge
Specifically oriented towards beginners and those who have a lot of difficulty with oral expression, the Balingua® Method in its current form is not in and of itself a complete course. That’s why the Balingua® Method is complimentary to traditional methods and can unlock their full potential.
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