romeo.alpha wrote:I'm not familiar with Harold Goodman, but I have to disagree with your take on Paul Noble. The way he set up the course is actually quite brilliant, and I've seen that approach applied in textbook courses as well (Kullu Tamam/Ahlan wa Sahlan for Egyptian Arabic for instance). What he does is look at what order to present a language in to make it easy. With French he starts with the past tense, because then you don't need to worry about different conjugation based on person or gender.
Do you mean the passé compose or the imparfait? At the moment I don't quite see how either means not conjugating for person or gender...
Then he introduces it back in later. That's not a normal order that French is presented.[…]It's a lot more thought than MT put into his course, simply working off cognates. It is also something Mihalis did really well with Arabic, just going with adjectives as verbs because it's a lot easier to work with than conjugating everything.
Except that actually, Paul Noble took his cues from MT on this too. Michel Thomas brings in a lot of modal verbs ("handles", in his terminology) and explicitly says to stick one in front of a "full verb" (i.e. infinitive) if you can't remember how to conjugate.
Regardless, Thomas relies on cognates far less than it may seem -- if you look at the core content of his courses, there's a lot of similarity between what's in the German course and what's in the courses in the Romance languages. The cognates are at times just handy bonuses and at other times just a happy coincidence that makes the whole process easier.
This seems to be begging the question a bit, in that it accepts that Thomas actually was an effective teacher. Donovan Nagel does a pretty good takedown of that in his review of Michel Thomas, and juxtaposing Woody Allen's endorsement of the method with the video of him unable to converse in French is quite damning. I'm really not convinced Michel Thomas is effective at anything more than making people think they can speak a language, and giving them the confidence boost to keep on learning.
Nagel's review can be summarised quite simply as:
"This isn't the communicative approach, so it's bad."
The only points he raises that aren't covered by that statement are the ones that are specific to the posthumous MT method courses (most notably the weird two-teacher setup).
To break down his points:
"The Michel Thomas Method has been around for a long time but age is not a reliable indicator of quality...Consensus on effective methods changes dramatically over time, and approaches that were extremely popular decades ago (like that of Michel Thomas) may have been rendered obsolete by contemporary research."
But when he talks about communicative language teaching (CLT) he describes it as "contemporary".
Actually, while MT started teaching in the late 40s, his method never became popular until very recently as they were basically restricted to his own school until Hodder published the CDs in the 2000s.
The communicative approach dates to the 1970s and was popular in the 80s and 90s, decades before MT became widely known. This criticism is at best pots and kettles, and arguably back-to-front.
See, CLT was on the wane in the 90s, because research said it wasn't all that good. It got a second wind around 2000. Why? Well, probably because of the English teaching industry. It's an approach that works acceptably in a language without a lot of morphological complexity, and it's an approach that hordes of gap-year TEFL teachers can be trained to do in a few weeks.
On celebrity endorsements:
"I see these A-list endorsements in Michel Thomas advertising, on other reviews and videos and what it says to me is that somebody somewhere probably got paid good money to say very nice things."
Irrelevancy. First up, marketing's marketing, and saying "it can't be good, otherwise they wouldn't need to market it" is silly.
Besides, I doubt Hodder would have had enough to pay Woody Allen to say Thomas was a good teacher if he wasn't happy with what Thomas had done.
There is one genuinely valid criticism of the Allen quote: it's not actually about the CD course -- it's about Thomas teaching personally. (Well, the fact that he doesn't speak French fluently is valid too, I suppose, but no-one ever learned to fluency from a single beginner's course.)
"These aren’t linguists or teachers making recommendations."
And how many self-access resources on the market have any quotes whatsoever from teachers or linguists? The only teacher who endorses your average bookshop course is the teacher that wrote the course.
"They’re actors.
And they make a living by doing and saying things that aren’t necessarily true."
Just like the marketing people who write the box blurb for your average course. Why does having an actor's opinion that may possibly be genuine make it worse than only having copy written by someone whose only contact with the course was reading the job brief and being paid to anonymously claim that it's good and backed by unspecified "research"?
"One thing that I find particularly at odds with everything I’ve learned as a language educator is the Michel Thomas emphasis on full teacher responsibility."
He's dead wrong here. I have seen so many teachers blame students for not trying hard enough, and I've seen students in tears because they've been trying really, really hard and still don't get it. They don't get it because the teaching is confusing. If my student doesn't know something, it's because I've not taught them it. It doesn't matter if I've told them ten times, if they don't know it, that means that I've only "told" and never "taught". In his recent video on the topic, Donovan actually suggests that MT is teaching "about language", not teaching "a language", which would be a matter of telling (giving information) not teaching (enabling people to acquire and use a new skill).
When you teach, the other person learns as a consequence. If you need students to do lots to learn, then that means you've only told them...
… assuming you are working intensively, that is. One of the weaknesses of the MT course is that it never gives you any advice on this. If you sit down to work on it once a week, you're going to forget too much between sessions. And that's what homework is about in my mind: making sure your students don't forget between sessions.
"Even as children we can’t be forced to acquire knowledge. We can only be guided."
Constructivism talks about the learner building their own knowledge in their head -- the teacher cannot construct the knowledge for them.
However, there is the analogy of "scaffolding" used in constructivist thought. If I build a physical scaffold, builders can get to where the walls they are building are/will be -- similarly, a teacher can construct a metaphorical scaffold by developing an environment where the student has easy access to the knowledge required to construct new learning in their heads. CLT uses scaffolding -- the teacher presents particular situations, phrases etc with the aim that the student acquires certain language.
Personally, I find that as a learner, the CLT classroom doesn't have enough teacher control. The teacher wants me to do something, but isn't allowed to tell me what it is.
Then when I'm called to speak, I have to think about what I'm being asked, think about how I want to answer, consider whether I can answer the way I want to, decide I can't, try to choose something else to say...
… it's exhausting. So this is a good thing:
"The Michel Thomas classroom is 100% teacher-controlled."
"Unlike a contemporary(ahem... 1970s) language classroom that uses a communicative approach and allows students to move around, form groups and have the freedom to interact and make mistakes, the MT setting is like a psychiatrist’s couch where the students’ hands are held through every single step of the session."
And why not? It's aimed at absolute beginners. If you set me in a beginners Swahili classroom with a dozen other native English speakers and ask me to interact with them, well I'll want to interact with them in English, because I don't speak Swahili. What ends up happening is that students repeat simple scripted patterns, acting like little more than glorified phone menu systems, because true[ interaction is impossible.
Furthermore, a beginner in a CLT classroom is forced to interact with other beginners, and that doesn't square up with his points that:
A: "But the main issue for me is that her accent is awful."
and
B: "you should be learning from native speakers anyway"
(Of course, he does qualify this second one with: "(unless it’s not an option)." but that's a bit of a hand-wavy cop-out in my book.)
I hate CLT-type activities as a learner, as my classmates generally have far worse accents than a highly-rated teacher like Jane Wightwick, and not only does that mean I'm exposed to an incorrect model, but it actively discourages me from speaking the TL at my best (in terms of pronunciation, vocab and grammar), because if I speak well, they won't understand me. Which links on nicely to another problem:
"Unfortunately the course is almost entirely taken up by English."
Ah, the demonisation of L1 in the classroom. Well I'm sorry, but just as I have to simplify my Welsh in a Welsh class for the sake of my fellow students, so do I have to simplify my English when I'm teaching English to foreigners, and it's extremely hard to find a good balance between simplicity and naturalness. It's rare to meet a teacher who can actually go into a TL-only classroom and still sound natural. Most English teachers I've known overpronounce their vowels to be easier to understand, and many mangle the rhythm of the language while they're at it.
(Although that said, I do think some of the non-Thomas MT courses do tend to get a bit lecturey at times.)
""There are constant error corrections by the teacher.
One main feature of the MT Method is that the teacher maintains flow until a student makes a mistake in which case they’re instantly corrected on the spot before moving on."
This is an oversimplified view of error correction.
First up, he's disregarding the difference between "fluency practice" and "accuracy practice". If you're practicing fluency then yes, breaking the flow is bad, because "fluent" means "flowing", and your target is flow. However, none of Thomas's activities are working with fluency, only accuracy, and there's no reason to assume that breaking the flow is an issue here, as it's not interfering with the goal.
"While it’s still a contentious issue for some, most language teachers these days would argue against this."
i.e. "not everyone agrees, but I'm right and other people are wrong."
"The general consensus in second language teaching these days is to correct errors if there’s a miscommunication in meaning but that stopping students every single time they make a grammar mistake is detrimental to self-esteem and motivation."
And here we get back to his misrepresentation of 1970s/80s CLT as "modern", although technically he is correct, as the majority of teachers are CLT teachers; it's just that the researchers disagree with the idea that meaning is all that matters. The Krashenite idea that students will learn the form as long as you focus on the meaning is very heavily discredited, or to use his term "rendered obsolete by research". (Well, I exaggerate. There are still researchers in the US claiming that this is true, but the rest of the world seems to disagree.)
The consensus among most researchers is that there must be active focus on form within a meaningful context, and too often teachers interpret "meaningful context" to mean situational roleplay. One of the things I like about Thomas himself is that a lot of his sentences are intrinsically meaningful without needing embedded in a concrete context. E.g. "I want it, but I don't have it," or "I would do it for you today, but I can't because I'm too busy." I argue that this intrinsic meaning is far more linguistically meaningful than "The pen is on the table," which has a lot of superficial meaning, but doesn't really connect with any desire to communicate.
Focusing only on failure to convey meaning doesn't demonstrate to students the key features of form, and correcting only where meaning is lost does not lead to acquisition of correct form in all cases.
"Whatever your view or preference is on this issue, it’s worth bearing in mind that the MT classroom is not student-led."
CLT isn't either -- it only aims to be student-centred, and even then, I've met precious few teachers who don't just push students through a pre-planned syllabus with rigid materials.
"The course does not – in any way whatsoever – train listening comprehension skills."
That assumes that speaking and listening are instrinsically separate activities, but they're not -- they share many, many cognitive mechanisms. For one thing, they share a language model and I argue that Thomas isn't "teaching speaking" but rather "teaching a language model through speaking".
(But there's even a theory that listening comprehension is basically a process of reconstructing "what would I mean if I had said that?")
"It is in fact 100% devoid of any authentic listening opportunities."
I would challenge any teacher to find useful authentic listening materials that can be understood by students in the first week of an intensive course for absolute beginners. To me this criticism is like saying that a driving instructor is rubbish because he didn't take you on the motorway/freeway in the first 5 lesons.
