The mastery of reading comprehension is an important foundation in learning English at the junior high school (SMP) level, especially in the West Java region where the challenge of switching from a mother tongue to a foreign language often triggers psychological obstacles. The main obstacle that students often face in understanding narrative, descriptive, and expository texts is not only vocabulary limitations, but high language anxiety and fear of failure when digesting complex sentence structures. Conventional learning methods that are rigid and tend to focus on grammar memorization often make the classroom environment feel stressful, thus reducing motivation and limiting the absorption of students’ brains. In the pedagogical context in West Java, a transformative approach is needed that is able to reduce these affective barriers so that the process of receiving written visual information can take place optimally.
The Suggestopedia method, developed by Georgi Lozanov, is present as a pedagogical solution that utilizes the principles of desuggestion and positive suggestion to liberate students’ unconscious potential in learning. The main principle of this method is to create a learning atmosphere that is very conducive, comfortable, and free from psychological pressure through a combination of art, classical or baroque music, and relaxed classroom arrangement. When implemented in reading comprehension learning for junior high school students, Suggestopedia helps students enter a state of concentrated pseudo-passivity, which is a state of relaxation but still mentally focused. Baroque music played at a slow tempo during reading helps to align brain waves to alpha frequencies, thereby reducing nervous tension and opening up students’ long-term memory to absorb new vocabulary and understand text inference without feeling burdened.
The implementation of Suggestopedia in junior high school classrooms in West Java requires a structured technical adaptation through three main stages: pre-session, first concert session (active), and second concert session (passive). In the initial stage, teachers build positive suggestions by introducing the theme of reading texts through casual conversations, role-plays, or interesting visualizations to generate students’ confidence. Furthermore, in active concert sessions, teachers read English texts with dynamic and expressive intonation accompanied by classical music, while students follow the readings on a text sheet equipped with context translations next to them. In the passive concert session, students close the text sheet and simply listen to the reading of the text by the teacher casually while enjoying the music. This gradual process has proven to be effective in helping students in urban and rural areas of West Java in capturing the main idea, explicit information, and implicit meaning of the reading text with a much deeper level of understanding.
Empirically, the integration of Suggestopedia in reading learning has a significant impact on improving reading comprehension scores and changing the learning attitudes of junior high school students in West Java. A classroom environment colored by emotional comfort has been proven to reduce language anxiety, so that students who were previously passive and reluctant to read long texts become more proactive and responsive when answering questions of comprehension of reading content. In addition, the positive correlation between mental relaxation and memory facilitates the retention of new vocabulary more naturally without the need for saturation mechanical memorization. The robustness of this method can also be seen from the increased involvement of students in group discussions to relate the local cultural context of West Java to the theme of global reading presented in the text.
The use of the Suggestopedia method proves that the optimization of reading comprehension skills of junior high school students in West Java does not only depend on the teaching material, but is highly determined by the governance of the emotional atmosphere of learning. By integrating musical auditory stimulation and positive psychological conditioning, students can overcome affective barriers and significantly improve their English literacy skills. The practical implications of this study encourage educators and education policy makers in West Java to start adopting a brain-friendly learning approach. In the future, teacher training in combining elements of Suggestopedia with the national curriculum needs to be continuously improved to create a generation of students who are communicative, literate, and confident in facing global challenges.
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