In traditional language instruction, when a new grammatical point or sentence structure is presented to you, a teacher will typically provide the student with a number of grammatical rules, written in the student's native language, or a chart showing the grammatical categories within which a word and its variations fall. Such analytical presentations are comforting, because the teacher feels that he has done his job and the student feels he "possesses" the necessary information in a neat, comprehensible little package. Indeed, if the student is evaluated solely on the basis of reproducing those rules or charts in written form, or is merely required to manipulate the words in writing on a test paper, his grade may prove quite satisfactory. In such a case, everyone is happy until the day that the student, likely years later, finds himself confronted with a native speaker of the language the student had ostensibly learned back in high school or college. Suddenly, because of the purely academic and written mode of presentation the young person received while in school, he finds himself wholly incapable of verbally interacting with the native speaker who is depending upon him for communication. Grades are important, and making a student feel comfortable seems nice, but utter oral ineptitude in the "real world" reveals those years of academic training for what they were - exercises in futility and largely pointless beyond the scholastic realm.

By contrast, the ULAT presents the meaning of words and structures visually and in context and then, once their meaning and organization have become evident, leads the student through extensive reinforcement culminating in the use of accelerating PowerPoint presentations. The screens of these PowerPoint presentations contain examples in pictoral fashion of the vocabulary and grammatical structures studied in their particular lesson. The learner must see the images on each screen and form the statement which these images represent. Throughout the PowerPoint, the screens gradually accelerate until the student is obliged to form his statement so rapidly that he has no time to reflect on it in his native language. Rather, the student is trained to form the statement rapidly enough that he can only succeed if the structure has become a reflex response, as opposed to a response requiring conscious reflection and analysis.