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Michel Thomas | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Programs, Books & Tapes |  | |
 jeff_lindqvist Diglot Moderator SwedenRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6910 days ago 4250 posts - 5711 votes  Speaks: Swedish*, English Studies: German, Spanish, Russian, Dutch, Mandarin, Esperanto, Irish, French Personal Language Map | Message 153 of 185 18 January 2009 at 7:48pm | IP Logged | ||
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"The teacher then introduces short words and phrases in the target language. The students are asked 'How would you say?' an English phrase into the target language, starting with trivially simple sentences and gradually building up to more advanced constructions. The phrases are chosen as common building blocks of the expression of thoughts. When a student gives a correct answer, the teacher repeats the whole sentence with correct pronunciation. When the student's answer is wrong, the teacher assists the student to understand their mistake and to correct it. The most important words and phrases are reviewed repeatedly during the course. It is learning mostly by example, as you learnt your mother tongue, before you went to school."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michel_Thomas_Method 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Cainntear Pentaglot Senior Member Scotland linguafrankly.blogsp Joined 6012 days ago 4399 posts - 7687 votes Speaks: Lowland Scots, English*, French, Spanish, Scottish Gaelic Studies: Catalan, Italian, German, Irish, Welsh | Message 154 of 185 19 January 2009 at 8:13am | IP Logged | ||
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The wiki entry is a bit weak, to say the least.
In general, you can group most language courses into two camps: topic-led and structure-led. A topic-led course goes through chapters with titles like "at the airport", "at the hotel" etc, containing many phrases with little grammatical or linguistic link to each other. I don't like these courses as the examples are too disjoint to help me build a complete understanding of the language -- you can say the sentences in the book, but damned if you can say anything else. Structure-led courses, on the other hand, focus on individual grammar points and teach related points of language together. I prefer these as they help you gain an understanding of how various features of the language are related to each other. The historic problem with structure-led courses is that they don't break things down far enough -- instead they leave you with things like verb tables that they regard as atomic: the single lowest level of the language. Thomas addresses this by breaking things right down to their simplest forms. He teaches grammar, but he teaches individual forms of the verb and the relationships between them. He then draws parallels between the relationships in one tense and their equivalents in another. So instead of providing lots of "big" rules, he picks out the much smaller set of small rules -- these small rules combine in lots of different ways, and give all the "big" rules. If you want to hear it in action, check out the (hour long) downloads at www.michelthomas.co.uk , but make sure you try the Italian, Spanish, French or German as these are the only ones taught by him. The others are pale imitations. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Elagabalus Diglot Newbie United States Joined 5195 days ago 12 posts - 30 votes Speaks: English*, PortugueseC1 Studies: Mandarin, German, Russian, French | Message 155 of 185 04 October 2010 at 3:47pm | IP Logged | ||
Have you or anyone else worked out the exact sequences and patterns that MT uses (that reoccur as his overall approach to teaching) so as to give students those 'small rules' and their 'combinations'? I'm attempting to do this now using transcripts of several of the courses, but my time is rather constrained at present, so I'd love to compare notes. This thread has helped considerably, I must say, including just finding the transcripts themselves (I thought I had to go at it alone, geez!). 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| hobbitofny Senior Member United States Joined 6234 days ago 280 posts - 408 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Russian | Message 156 of 185 04 October 2010 at 11:24pm | IP Logged | ||
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The most detailed study of the MT method that I have seen is in the book, Michel Thomas: The Learning Revolution by Jonathan Solity, ISBN-13: 978-0340928332, Hodder Arnold (May 30, 2008).
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| BartoG Diglot Senior Member United States confession Joined 5448 days ago 292 posts - 818 votes Speaks: English*, French Studies: Italian, Spanish, Latin, Uzbek | Message 157 of 185 05 October 2010 at 6:59am | IP Logged | ||
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Elagabalus,
It's worth remembering that the patented Michel Thomas method did not involve the content of his teaching: It was the recording of a class with two students structured so that an outside person could participate as a third student by use of the pause button. The rules and combinations that Thomas presents can be found in many places, my favorite being Bodmer's Loom of Language. What makes the courses work though are two things: First, as Cainntear notes, things are broken down to the simplest elements - it's not the table or list of items that makes the difference but their gradual introduction, with every last element and ending getting specific practice. Second, referring back to the patent, is that with the original Michel Thomas courses, you're listening to an actual class where he kept working with actual students until they got it. With most courses, including, alas, several of the Michel Thomas Method courses not recorded by Thomas, they cover what they plan to cover and it's up to you, the student, to do your best with it. With the original Michel Thomas courses, though, there's no need to worry about whether you can really learn the whole course's contents in 10 hours or so - two people have already done it under Thomas' guidance. So if you're looking to replicate the real Michel Thomas Method, it's not just a question of figuring out the structures he taught. It's equally important to build something in so that your focus will be on whether those structures have actually been acquired, not just covered, before moving on to the next thing. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Elagabalus Diglot Newbie United States Joined 5195 days ago 12 posts - 30 votes Speaks: English*, PortugueseC1 Studies: Mandarin, German, Russian, French | Message 158 of 185 05 October 2010 at 4:28pm | IP Logged | ||
Hi Hobbit and Barto, I have Solity's book. It's quite worthwhile, but more for his attention to "instructional psychology" as applied to MT than his analysis of MT itself. That said, it was like getting an education 101 course in nice neat package and, in fact, far more useful than the theory I got in teaching training (TESOL) some moons ago. Though there's much to admire in ESL methodology, the Solity book really made me see that the TEFL/ESL industry is founded on the wrong principles (or maybe written by monolingual people who don't quite get it?). But, responding to Barto, Loom of Language is a great suggestion...I wonder if there are any more recent (updated) cross-lingual learning/teaching books in the vein of Loom? Loom is so old that it's public domain these days (I downloaded it through Project Gutenberg). Still, a great book and a great suggestion. On the other two points, above, I think I disagree about it not being about the "list of items that makes the difference". He's moving from cognates gradually into the intricacies of the L2. I suspect he has an original, or at least very effective, way of doing that that other methods do not. I wanted to see if there was indeed one over arching pattern across the language courses. Loom is all about that learning style, of course, so maybe there's my answer. The other point you raise is quite important for both teaching and learning, and I think that that's one point in Solity's book that is especially well developed: "interleaved" learning: what it is and how to do it (as MT did it). Perhaps the list of items is not the main thing with MT, but the pattern of "interleaved" presentation and practice surely is. I suspect that MT adhered to more than mechanical repetition, i.e. repeat point A after 5 sentences, give rule for A after 10, or something like that. I suspect that his way of interleaving the items also adhered to a greater pattern. Anyway, the reason I am saying all this is because of the point someone made, somewhere in this thread, that the MT method is all about not relying on knowledge, but instinct. So, he's teaching through not conscious memory but by enabling the unconscious type, akin to muscle memory in athletic training. I'd really like to know how to do that, for sure, and to be sure that I am doing it right : ) 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| BartoG Diglot Senior Member United States confession Joined 5448 days ago 292 posts - 818 votes Speaks: English*, French Studies: Italian, Spanish, Latin, Uzbek | Message 159 of 185 07 October 2010 at 7:46am | IP Logged | ||
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Elagabalus,
I would add one thing to my prior note, because I'll agree that the sequencing does matter. More to the point, the seeming avoidance of sequencing matters. As has been noted, a lot of courses introduce the direct object pronouns, then the indirect object pronouns, the present tense conjugation, then the past tense conjugation, etc. Thomas does have a sort of pattern: the familiar > the necessary > the newly familiar People lay way too much emphasis on cognates when talking about Thomas. What he was about, from what I can see, was making sure the student had something he or she could learn. Starting with cognates and a few simple verbs was great for giving students the impression they could do a lot with the language from the get-go. From there, what you see though is not continually falling back on cognates, but continually falling back on the familiar. If you look at the way that the conjugation of "to have" leads into the future, for example, what you see is a clever structuring that allows the student to see that he or she is just learning a new thing to do with something already known. If memory serves, it's the same with the direct object pronouns and their similarity to the definite articles. Even though the course continually builds on itself, however, each point is worked through and tested and retested until it is clear the students have mastered this thing they already know but under new circumstances. If you look at the Romance language courses, you probably will find an overarching sequence. But that's not because there's some magic there. It's because they're similar languages. The German course, if I remember correctly (it's been a while) was rather different in places from the Spanish and Italian, and rightly so because the building blocks you need are different. So to expand on my earlier thought, "it's not the table or list of items that makes the difference but their gradual introduction," if you're trying to find the sequence Michel Thomas would have used, it's not a question of which grammatical forms in which order. It's a question of what logically leads to what. A Turkish Michel Thomas program, for example, would do a lot with the similarity between the possessive endings and certain verb endings: "I have already told you that when a word ends in a vowel and an m - the 'm track' - it is about 'me'. Now if you want to say 'I want' you say 'istiyorum' - it is like 'my wanting'..."* Now, the thing is the 3rd person present tense ending and the 3rd person possessive are completely different. In most language courses, this would be a problem because the tables wouldn't line up. But with a Michel Thomas course, you wouldn't introduce all the possessive endings at once at one point and all the verb endings at another point, and you wouldn't say "the present tense endings are like the possessive endings, sort of, except for..." You would just reinforce that the -vowel-m ending had an association with the "I form" of the verb as well as the "my form" of a noun and introduce the 3rd person endings with different associations since with Michel Thomas you don't learn lists and tables, you learn individual elements gradually, one by one, sticking with them until they are learned. *This example is inexact and oversimplified, I'm aware. It should give an idea, however, of how something we'd never link up in the Romance languages - the possessives and verb endings - can be linked up in Turkish to facilitate learning and remembering. Given this, I think that to sequence material like Michel Thomas, you don't need to know the way he sequenced material for other languages, per se. You need to think the way he thought about breaking language down into its smallest components so you could perceive common threads to tie together. 6 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Elagabalus Diglot Newbie United States Joined 5195 days ago 12 posts - 30 votes Speaks: English*, PortugueseC1 Studies: Mandarin, German, Russian, French | Message 160 of 185 08 October 2010 at 12:38am | IP Logged | ||
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Hmmm...pretty compelling argument. Maybe you're right.
But, one thing is still bothering me. How does someone have the brass bocce balls to charge a-listers top dollar out there in Hollywood land, if there's any chance they wouldn't learn as promised (well besides that money back guarantee). So, to be able to cover and get the student to internalize all the language points in just 5 days, or 10 hours or whatever it was, it seems you'd have to have more than just confidence and a technique of building on the familiar. Plus, the method was largely subliminal. Students were internalizing without knowledge about the language. How do you get structural experience into someone's head without their knowledge. So, it seems to me there must have been an overall framework, a sequence of sequences, to cram all that into someone's head so fast. I mean, I haven't really done an analysis yet, but it does seem that he's going through a 'local' pattern of positive statement, negative statement, direct question, embedded question (Is it that you want me to do it), and then on to modals in those same patterns, and so on. On a larger scale of course he's moving through the tense system, but I wonder if there isn't more method in his madness on the larger scale. Well, I hope to have time to look at each track side by side of several courses to find out. Speaking about a-listers, I remember hearing Wood Allen speak French in the documentary "Wild Man Blues" about 10 years ago, and he was not what you would call fluent. Hopefully that was pre-MT and not post but I don't think so. Maybe that says more about Woody than MT : ) Edited by Elagabalus on 08 October 2010 at 12:40am 1 person has voted this message useful |
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