The Learning Revolution

Most of us don't look particularly fondly back at language lessons at school, and probably don't feel that we got a great deal benefit from them. In Michel Thomas Method:The Learning Revolution Jonathan Solity explains how a different method of teaching has brought impressive results.

The book starts with an account of the life of Michel Thomas - the struggles of his early life, and his development of new ways of teaching, which have been successful in teaching languages to those who had seemingly been unable or unwilling to learn them. Michel Thomas believed that learning was primarily the responsibility of the teacher. Solity contrasts this with the attitude of traditional teaching methods, which are too keen to blame the student for problems with learning. He also argues that teaching methods have been adopted with insufficient testing of their effectiveness. The later part of the book goes into detail of how the Michel Thomas Method is used in practice, in particular in teaching Spanish.

I felt that the book spent a lot of time going over the same arguments against typical teaching methods, and that this space could have been put to better use going into more detail about the structure of Michel Thomas's method. However, if you are interested in implementing new ways of teaching then you will find many useful ideas in this short book.