Review of Michel Thomas's language course

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Review of Michel Thomas's language course David Block To cite this article: David Block (2003) Review of Michel Thomas's language course, The Language Learning Journal, 27:1, 74-78, DOI: 10.1080/09571730385200111 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09571730385200111

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Date: 09 September 2016, At: 10:14

Language Learning Journal, Summer 2003, No 27, 74-78

Review of Michel Thomas's language course David Block Institute of Education, University of London

I begin this review with some general comments about the author, Michel Thomas, his background and the 1997 BBC documentary about his approach to language teaching. I then go on to critique his Spanish course, citing specific examples of explanations of the language learning process and pronunciation and grammar teaching. I conctude that despite its obvious shortcomings, Thomas's course and his teaching methodology are of interest because of his specific focus on form.

INTRODUCTION "His theory of language is ...structuralist: ...language as an observable system of structurally related elements used to encode meaning, which are combined and recombined to construct sentences."

Address for correspondence: David Block Institute of Education 20 Bedford Way London WC1H 0AL [email protected] 74

We are asked on the cover of the CD version of the Michel Thomas Spanish course what we ' c o u l d have in c o m m o n with' celebrities such as E m m a Thompson, Princess Grace and Eddie Izzard (!) and we are told that this CD is 'the first time ever [that] M i c h e l T h o m a s ' s a m a z i n g t e a c h i n g m e t h o d is available to e v e r y o n e ' . The key assumption in this sales pitch seems to be that everyone knows about Michel Thomas, his link with celebrities and his 'amazing teaching m e t h o d ' . I for one certainly do, but for those who do not, I begin this review with some background information about the man and his method.

MICHEL METHOD

THOMAS

AND

HIS

I first came across the name Michel Thomas when I saw a television documentary broadcast on BBC 2 in March 1997, entitled 'The Language M a s t e r ' . I learned from this programme, along with several newspaper articles published in the period 199799, a n d f r o m t h u m b i n g t h r o u g h T h o m a s ' s biography (Robbins, 1999) one afternoon at a local bookshop, a fair amount about his life. I know that he was born Moshe K r o s h o f in Poland some 85 years ago and that at an early age he was sent by his m o t h e r to G e r m a n y to e s c a p e P o l i s h antiSemitism and receive a better education. However, with Hitler's rise to power in 1933, he went to Paris where he s t u d i e d p s y c h o l o g y at the S o r b o n n e . Life was not bad in Paris until the outbreak of the Second World War and the subsequent installation

of the Vichy regime. During this period Thomas was imprisoned and tortured on several occasions due to his R e s i s t a n c e a c t i v i s m . H o w e v e r , he s u r v i v e d t h i s o r d e a l and he w a s e v e n t u a l l y e m p l o y e d by the US Counterintelligence Corps. He spent the latter part of the war and the period j u s t a f t e r w o r k i n g as an u n d e r c o v e r s p y and Gestapo m e m b e r interrogator, where his language skills (he claims to be proficient in six languages) were surely useful. Indeed, he is said to have been responsible for the prosecution of 2,000 people w o r k i n g in p o s t - w a r Nazi underground organisations. In 1947 he m o v e d to the United States, settling in Los Angeles, and he eventually became a US citizen. The by-then Michel Thomas soon realised that his talents as a linguist might be used to his advantage and he opened his first language school. It was at this point, almost sixty years ago, that he began to perfect his so-called ' m e t h o d ' and to j u d g e by the long list o f famous film stars he has had as students (e.g. Jean-Paul Belmondo, Warren Beatty, Raquel Welch and Emma Thompson), he would appear to deserve the label 'The Language M a s t e r ' . But what is this method that has made him so s u c c e s s f u l e c o n o m i c a l l y and so f a m o u s as a language t e a c h e r ? In the TV d o c u m e n t a r y it is c l a i m e d that until that time T h o m a s had never explained in detail to anyone in public exactly what his method actually consisted of. In fact, by the end of the p r o g r a m m e we are not much the wiser as we get only a few glimpses of what could pass for classroom activity, and there are only a couple of occasions where Thomas ' e x p l a i n s ' his method. Elsewhere (Block, 2000, 2001), I have analysed T h o m a s ' s m e t h o d a c c o r d i n g to R i c h a r d s and Rodgers's (1986, 2001) model of Approach, Method and Technique. His theory of language is manifestly structuralist: he seems to see language as an o b s e r v a b l e s y s t e m o f s t r u c t u r a l l y related e l e m e n t s u s e d to e n c o d e m e a n i n g , w h i c h are combined and recombined to construct sentences. As regards his theory of learning, he seems to see Language Learning Journal

REVIEWOF MICHELTHOMAS'SLANGUAGECOURSE

the process as one involving the accretion of bits and pieces of language. As a teacher, Thomas works deductively (providing rules first) and crosslinguistically (from the known L1 to the unknown L2), and his general plan seems to be the presentation and demonstration of rules and meanings, followed by the elicitation of repetitions and patterned practice, all with the intention of manipulating the morphology, syntax and lexis of the language. To the extent that he follows a syllabus, it is a structural one, based on intuitive notions about the relative difficulty of particular chunks of syntax, elements of morphology and phonology, and lexis. Finally, the kinds of activities he organises for students tend to be straightforward explanations of formal aspects of the language, provided by the teacher, and the involvement of students in repetition and problem solving exercises. But how does all of this come together in practice? During the documentary Thomas is set the task of teaching French to nine students at an Islington secondary school who have been incapable of passing GCSE exams. The following excerpt, which takes place at the beginning of the documentary, is meant to exemplify T b o m a s ' s approach to language teaching. In it Thomas is introducing the French pronunciation of words ending in 'ible' and 'able'. (NB All spoken French is in italics.) MT: Words in English ending in i-b-l-e like 'possible', and in a-b-l-e like 'table', they all come from French. And they're the same, the same spelling, the same meaning, except for the prononciation, for the pronunciation. I-b-l-e in French is pronounced ible, like 'possible' would be possible. And a-b-l-e, because the letter 'a' is pronounced a, 'able' is pronounced able. 'Table' would be table. 'Acceptable' would be ... accept... S I : Accept-cept MT: Yes, come on S I : Acceptable, accept ... Mr: Yes S I : Acceptable Mr: Acceptable, yes, yes. And 'comfortable' would be confort... $2: Conf-ter-bal

Mr: Confort... S2: ta-table Mr: Right, say it again, confort... $2: Con-for-table

Mr: Confortable, confortable ... The reader will note that the students hardly produce any language at all and what little they produce is carefully guided by Thomas. Even by the end of the intensive week, students were barely able to produce short sentences without Thomas intervening. Thus, after watching the documentary programme about his method and reading the odd publication about his life, my general impression of Thomas was that he was not particularly No 27 Summer 2003

effective if we are to j u d g e by s t u d e n t s ' performance. However, there are two aspects of his methodology which I did find interesting. First, from what Thomas said about his teaching and what I was able to watch of it, I could see that he believes in explicit talk about language instruction and that the LI of the learner is a useful starting point for learning an L2 (more on this in a moment). The second aspect of Thomas's methodology that I found interesting was his 'use' of personality. As I argue elsewhere (Block, 2001), I think that he exemplifies the art side of language teaching in that personality, manner and charisma are certainly an important part of his teaching. But enough about the Thomas of the BBC documentary. What about the CD course I am meant to review?

THE ' M E T H O D ' RULES

AND G R O U N D

I have been given and asked to review a two-hourlong introductory course, which makes up one quarter of the complete eight-hour course. The booklet which a c c o m p a n i e s these two CDs provides us with a synopsis of what Thomas's method is about: Over a period of twenty-five years, Michel Thomas has developed and perfected a unique method of teaching languages. His approach gives startling results within a remarkably short time, all without the need for books, memorizing, or homework. In essence, Michel Thomas breaks a language down to its component parts and enables learners to r e c o n s t r u c t the language t h e m s e l v e s to form their own sentences, to say what they want, when they want. The experience of learning a language becomes so exciting and satisfying that it stimulates s e l f - m o t i v a t i o n and builds confidence. Michel Thomas presents the language within simple, elegant structures that echo the way the language is spoken. He achieves this by guiding you through carefully planned sets of exercises, that build up your understanding of the language almost without you realising it. You are able to absorb the structures effortlessly and apply them naturally right from the start.

"he believes in explicit talk about language instruction and that the L1 of the learner is a useful starting point for learning an L2"

This all makes sense in the light of my discussion of the BBC documentary above. It also makes sense in the light of what I have found on these two CDs. For two hours, over 22 lessons, Thomas very methodically goes through bits and pieces of Spanish, guiding and directing two students as they feed back to him phrases and sentences he has asked them to construct. He begins Lesson 1 with a general introduction to his course in which he basically repeats the description of his method. Importantly, he emphasises two 'ground rules'. One of these is simply that throughout the course he interacts with two students, whom he refers to, 75

D BLOCK

"1 find Thomas's declared opposition to memorising a little hard to sustain, given some of his teaching practices."

rather bizarrely, as 'a teaching device in order to create a learning situation for three'. The listener is to become 'the third in the group', but this will only happen if he/she stops the CD in order to repeat and produce words, phrases and sentences whenever Thomas asks, 'How do you say it?' The other ground rule is more about his theory of language learning, mainly the role of memorising. The learners are told that they are 'never to try to remember' and that they are to 'relax' and 'absorb' the language. Thomas remarks rather cryptically: 'What you know, you will not forget'. There is an odd Krashenesque quality to this rule, as Thomas seems to be saying that a conscious focus on any aspect of language will not lead to deep learning. What is needed - and here we have echoes of K r a s h e n ' s a f f e c t i v e filter and the n o t i o n o f acquisition (e.g. Krashen, 1985) - is for learners to relax and soak up everything in a natural way. However, I note that Thomas does a lot of very overt and explicit work on language as a formal system and he follows a procedure which depends on learners' remembering what has happened in previous lessons: whenever he introduces a new grammatical or lexical point, he always comes back to it after introducing an additional one. A simple example is to be found in Lesson 4 on CD 1. Thomas says to the two students (N.B. All spoken Spanish is in italics): The word for ' g o o d ' is bueno...bueno...bueno. He then continues: If you want to make it 'very good', ' v e r y ' is

'muy', spelt m-u-y. Then, relying on his previous teaching of 'es' the third person singular form of 'ser' (be) - as well as the students' memory of his having taught this word in an early lesson, Thomas asks one of the students to produce a sentence: 'It is very good' would be? ° T h o m a s also p e r i o d i c a l l y asks s t u d e n t s to associate the sounds of words in Spanish with words in English, presumably because this will make them more salient and t h u s likely to be r e m e m b e r e d . Thus, when presenting the verb 'tener' (have) in Lesson 6 on CD 2, he asks learners to think about someone who is 'tenacious' about h a v i n g s o m e t h i n g . T h o m a s does not seem to realise that his method of associating the sounds of target language words with L 1 words has a name in cognitive science - the 'keyword technique' and that it is considered a very conscious learning strategy. (Gaines and Redman (1986) long ago made this point in their book on vocabulary teaching and learning.) Given his actions, I really cannot understand w h y T h o m a s c o m e s out so s t r o n g l y a g a i n s t m e m o r i s i n g . As r e g a r d s the first p r o c e d u r e outlined above, does he really believe that learners 76

are not, of their own volition, memorising the bits and pieces of the language he is feeding to them, especially if they know he will always come back to points introduced earlier in the lesson? As regards his use of the keyword method, does he really believe that such associations can be made cognitively without any effort whatsoever on the part of the learners? Of course, T h o m a s might respond to these questions by saying that there is a d i s t i n c t i o n to be m a d e b e t w e e n the subconscious work of memory and the conscious work of memorising and that he is for the former and against the latter. Yet my reading of theories of cognition and information processing suggests that the workings of the mind are far more complex than such a dichotomy would suggest. However, to discuss in detail these q u e s t i o n s , and the arguments they lead to, would take us outside the scope of this paper and into the realm of cognitive science and specifically the role o f aspects of i n f o r m a t i o n p r o c e s s i n g and learning such as n o t i c i n g , c o n s c i o u s n e s s and a w a r e n e s s (see Robinson (2001) for a recent discussion). Suffice it to say that I find Thomas's declared opposition to memorising a little hard to sustain, given some of his teaching practices. W h e t h e r I agree with T h o m a s ' s v i e w s on memorising or not, I must admit that by the time he is coming to the end of Lesson 1, just over four and h a l f m i n u t e s into the r e c o r d i n g , he has captured the listener's attention with his slow soothing voice, clear delivery and old world accent. However, he spoils things somewhat for me at the end when he briefly discusses a 'pronunciation' question. This discussion proves to be an augury of more problems to come in the realm of L2 phonology.

PHONOLOGICAL PROBLEMS Thomas ends the first lesson by telling the listener that he/she will be learning 'standard Spanish language', before going onto to explain a 'slight difference in pronunciation' between the Spanish spoken in much of Spain ('so-called Castilian') and that spoken in Latin America and some parts of Spain. This difference is the pronunciation of Spanish zeta, /0/ in Castilian, and /s/ elsewhere. He explains this difference in very simple and easyto-understand language, but unfortunately does muddle the pronunciation a little when he says that ' c o r a z 6 n ' (heart) would be /ko~a'c3on/ in C a s t i l i a n - as o p p o s e d to / k o ~ a ' 0 o n / , and / ko~a'~on/ as opposed t o / k o f a ' s o n / . This proves to be the beginning of what is somewhat dubious pronunciation throughout. For example, there is a general tendency towards inconsistency in the production of vowels, as Thomas - sometimes for emphasis and sometimes seemingly unwittingly stretches vowels, creating what are essentially E n g l i s h - s o u n d i n g e l o n g a t e d v o w e l s (e.g. /e/ becomes /e:/) This sloppiness in pronunciation is perhaps most notable in the way that Thomas does n o t Language Learning Journal

REVIEWOF MICHELTHOMAS'SLANGUAGECOURSE

even address the distinction in Spanish between / if, as in ' c a r o ' (dear or expensive) a n d / r r / , as in ' c a r r o ' (cart in C a s t i l i a n , car in m a n y parts o f central and South America). In general he seems to p r o d u c e a s l i g h t l y r o t a t e d A m e r i c a n /r/. However, in Lesson 6 on CD 2, he actually presents the a d j e c t i v e ' c a r o ' as s o m e t h i n g that s o u n d s much more l i k e / ' k a r r o / t h a n / ' k a ~ o / , as it should be. Nonetheless, despite the 'inauthenticity' of his p r o n u n c i a t i o n , T h o m a s m a n a g e s to g e t the students on the tape to pronounce Spanish in a w a y that is p r o b a b l y no w o r s e than w h a t they w o u l d m a n a g e w e r e he a n a t i v e s p e a k e r w h o insisted on a perfect ' c o r a z 6 n ' or a perfect ' c a r o ' . I think there is an important point to be made here a b o u t the i m p o r t a n c e o f the native s p e a k e r in language teaching in relation to imparting a good a c c e n t and p r o n u n c i a t i o n to l e a r n e r s . T h o m a s clearly is not a native speaker of Spanish, and I even wondered at times how well he would get a l o n g in S p a n i s h s p e a k i n g c o n t e x t ; b u t his pronunciation is not really a problem if we consider that, particularly at beginning levels, learners are not likely even to register subtle differences, let alone produce them. M o r e importantly, T h o m a s gets around this p r o b l e m b e c a u s e his strengths as a teacher lie elsewhere, specifically in the way he explains syntax, morphology and lexis.

TALKING ABOUT LANGUAGE TO TEACH LANGUAGE Over the 20 main lessons (3-12 on CD 1 and 1-10 on CD 2), T h o m a s r e p e a t e d l y goes through the pattern of talking about language and how it works, making constant comparisons between English and S p a n i s h , b e f o r e t r y i n g to get s t u d e n t s to c o n s t r u c t s e n t e n c e s , s o m e o f w h i c h are q u i t e lengthy. The sentences themselves are not particularly interesting, but the way that Thomas systematically focusses on form is. I say this above all because of the way that communicative language teaching is so often interpreted as being a b o u t a v o i d i n g talk about l a n g u a g e and, m o r e importantly, about avoiding the use of the L1 in teaching (see Block, 2002). Thomas very clearly avoids neither. How he does so is illustrated in my d i s c u s s i o n a b o v e o f the d o c u m e n t a r y , w h e r e Thomas introduced a parallel to be made between 'words ending in i-b-l-e' and a-b-l-e' in English and French and then asked learners to say words. An e x a m p l e f r o m this c o u r s e of how T h o m a s combines an overt focus on language, drawing on the student's L1, with a building block approach, follows: M r : Words ending in t-i-o-n in English are the same in Spanish and t-i-o-n in English is spelt with c-i-o-n because that's how you pronounce it. So you d o n ' t have t h e / ~ n / in S p a n i s h b u t / s i ' o n / , c - i - o - n . L i k e ' c o n d i t i o n ' would be? S I : Condici6n Mr: Condici6n. Condici6n, The c o n d i t i o n ? No 27 Summer 2003

La condici6n La condici6n. A condition? Una condici6n. Una condici6n, And what condition? Qu~ condici6n Right. Qud condici6n. A n d r e s e r v a t i o n would be? $1: Reservaci6n M r : R i g h t , reservaci6n. So e v e r y t h i n g in / ' e : ~ n / , everything that ends in / ' e : g ~ n / , so the ' a ' is p r o n o u n c e d / a / so ' a t i o n ' is /asi'on/, /asi'on/, / a s i ' o n / ...

SI: Mr: SI: Mr: SI: Mr:

A f t e r r e h e a r s i n g this r o u t i n e with the s e c o n d student, Thomas then ups the ante with student 1 (S1) as follows: M r : How would you say: ' D o you have the confirmation of the reservation for me for tonight?' The word for ' o f ' is de, spelled d - e , de. So ' t h e c o n f i r m a t i o n o f t h e reservation' would be? S I : La confirmaci6n. MT: Of the reservation? S I : De la reservaci6n. Mr: Right, La confirmaci6n de la reservaci6n. And, ' D o you have the confirmation o f the reservation for me for tonight?' would be? S I : Tiene la confirmacidnM r : of the reservation. S I : De la reservaci6n Mr: Not/do/, but/de/ S I : /de/ ... De la reservaci6n Mr: De la reservacidn. For me S l : Para mi M r : For tonight S I : Para esta noche At this point, Thomas comes back in to produce the e n t i r e q u e s t i o n in S p a n i s h . He d o e s not, however, ask the student to do the same, as he moves on to the introduction of another question: ' W h a t type of reservation do you have?'

"Thomas repeatedly goes through the pattern of talking about language and how it works, making constant comparisons between English and Spanish"

CONCLUSION This excerpt, in a sense, sums up what I think is good about T h o m a s ' s teaching and what I think is bad, and therefore what I see as the good and the bad sides of his course. On the up side, I find it interesting that he explicitly focusses on the target language as a system and that he establishes links with the L1. W h i l e he does oversimplify matters to an extreme at times, perhaps this is not such a b a d t h i n g in the e a r l y s t a g e s o f t e a c h i n g a language. In addition, I find it interesting that what he does flies in the face of the c o m m o n call in language teaching circles for 'authentic' and 'real life' language in the classroom (e.g. the National Curriculum for Foreign Languages). The sentences p r o d u c e d by T h o m a s and his s t u d e n t s are not brimming with interest value and one might even wonder if the occasion to pronounce some of them would ever arise outside of his course. However, 77

D BLOCK

"Thomas neither lets his students loose to produce some of his extended sentences... nor ever has them engage in anything like a conversation"

78

as Cook (2000) notes, sentences that are said to have 'no meaning' (2000: 168), or which are not d e e m e d ' a c c u r a t e r e f l e c t i o n s o f the w a y t h e l a n g u a g e is ' r e a l l y ' u s e d ' (ibid.), or which are qualified as 'peculiar' or 'bizarre' (2000: 169) might serve all kinds of other functions in the language learning process. For example, they might be a way o f p l a y i n g w i t h the s o u n d s o f the l a n g u a g e (certainly Thomas's string of cidns fits this bill) or t h e y m i g h t s i m p l y g i v e the l e a r n e r a sense o f achievement at having produced something in the target language. Thomas is thus an innovator of sorts in his t e a c h i n g b e c a u s e he r e l i e s on an approach which over the past 30 years has fallen out of favour in foreign language teaching circles, particularly in Europe and North America. On the down side, I continue to have a problem with the fact that Thomas neither lets his students loose to produce some of his extended sentences and questions in full nor ever has them engage in anything like a conversation with him or each other. Of course, if this course is to be used individually, as s e e m s to be the c a s e , then i n c o r p o r a t i n g conversation activities would be difficult. However, this raises the issue of whether or not the emphasis which Thomas places on the language side, which I think is positive, is not overshadowed by the bitty and phrasebook-like quality of what students are producing. Indeed, I was left wondering at the end

of the two hours if it is p e r h a p s the c a s e that Thomas's students are fine as long as he is with them, but h e l p l e s s when he is not. In the end, perhaps the best way for me to test Thomas's claims of success is to go and see Eddie I z z a r d do his stand-up comedy routine in French in Paris.

REFERENCES Block, D. (2000) 'Is method really dead?', APAC OF NEWS: ButlIeti de l'Associaci6 de Professors d'AnglOs de Catalunya, 39 (May): 31-44. Block, D. (2001) 'Art and Science in Language Teaching', In Bax, M. and Zwart, J-W. (eds) Reflections on Language and Language Learning. In honour o f Arthur van Essen, Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Block, D. (2002) ' C o m m u n i c a t i v e language teaching revisited: discourses in conflict and foreign national teachers.' Language Learning Journal 2 6 : 1 9 - 2 6 Cook, G. (2000) Language Play, Language Learning. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gaines, R. and Redman, S. (1986) Working with Words. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Krashen, S. (1985) The Input Hypothesis: Issues and Implications. Harlow: Longman. Richards, J. and Rodgers, T. (1986/2001) Approaches and Methods in Language Teaching. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Robbins, C. (1999) The Test o f Courage. New York: Random House. Robinson, P. (ed.) (2001) Cognition and Second Language Instruction. Cambridge University Press.

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