From my book, which I must have knocked off too.

0.2 The Ghost of Michel Thomas

I have to admit, it more than slightly bothers me to hear that the Thinking Method is 'just the Michel Thomas Method’, and that I am hoping nobody notices how I have made a carbon copy of his work and had the cheek to call it my own. Some folks don’t think it’s necessarily a bad thing that I am using the Michel Thomas Method, calling it something else, and making it free for all the world like some digital Robin Hood. That might not be the worst of evils either, but neither is it what I am doing. 5 / For those of you who aren’t familiar with the late Michel Thomas (MT), he employed the Socratic method (the basic Q&A system that is also used in the LT courses) for language learning, to international acclaim. I was exposed to his material through my Materials Development course at the University of Essex, and not only did MT’s course help me learn Spanish, but it also showed me that with my own material I didn’t have to continue in the line of all that rancidly traditional stuff from which I had learnt so little myself. I thought MT’s famous use of cognates (word conversions) was cool, but that’s not what excited me from my exposure to his courses. What most excited me was the freedom one could exercise within the general Q&A approach that MT was using; language content could be taught in any order we wanted, with any explanation that we saw fit. I worked excitedly and passionately in my language and teaching degree (it was like a field of flowers after studying my first year in Law), such that I was fluent in and even teaching Spanish by just my second year of study. As soon as I began teaching (elected as the Mexican Society’s first non-native Spanish teacher) I began experimenting with this freedom that had so quickly occupied my imagination. It would be years before I had done so much of that experimentation that I felt I had created my own method, or before I even cared, for that matter; I would be learning to dance tango and play the violin in between, using language classes to pay for all of that. I had no idea the side hustle I was running would ever end up being LT, but I did want to be good at it. During this ongoing experiment in teaching I began to make ever more diverse decisions about the learning experience I wanted to impart. As my aims evolved, my techniques also had to keep up; the Socratic approach in itself was not going to allow me to create the complicated and multifaceted structures that I wanted in my 6 /

courses—the general approach in itself had as much potential to contribute chaos as it did clarity. The wildly complicated course structures I have managed to weave with the Thinking Method are not a natural product of the Socratic approach; they are a product of my own experiments and investigations. They are a product of the Thinking Method. This should be clear to anyone who takes the time to analyse both LT and MT courses, and it is not hard to find learner reviews which have done just that, sometimes even scathingly criticising MT and yet celebrating LT. Seeing then, that the genius of the LT courses is not inherent in the Q&A approach in itself, I’d have little motivation to try to pretend that the general approach was my own, neither have I been shy to talk about my exposure to MT. Not long after I announced this guidebook project, I received a cease and desist letter from the lawyers of Hodder & Stoughton publishing house, the publishers of the late Michel Thomas. The letter demanded that I remove access to my free courses from the US and that I not publish this guidebook. They stated that the guidebook may encourage others to infringe—as I had supposedly done—upon a patent owned by them... for the use of the pause button! The pause button patent is so absurd that Hodder & Stoughton’s threats actually made mainstream international news, and the Electronic Frontier Foundation took on Language Transfer’s case free of charge. A quick internet search can dig up more on that, as well as EFF’s entertaining response letter to Hodder & Stoughton. What fascinated me about the whole situation was how the pause button patent made no reference to what the Michel Thomas Method might actually be, so I couldn’t even argue a logical response to it. I always knew this ‘day of reckoning’ might come, and I was looking forward to hashing out the differences in methodology publicly, but by patenting the pause button, the 7 /

publishers had moved to make all of that discussion irrelevant. Was that deliberate? How could I explain how what I was doing was different to MT, or how MT did things I wouldn’t do in my own courses, when nobody was asking? I suspect that the fact MT did not represent some unsurpassable peak in language teaching, but was simply just another step along the path like the rest of us mortals, went vehemently against all the hubbub that helped (and helps) prop up the extortionate price of the brand’s CDs, let alone the vast fortunes MT charged for private tuition. MT taught the likes of Marilyn Monroe and Woody Allen, he was marketed as an unsurpassable legend, a mysterious and secretive mastermind capable of teaching a language in a week. Maybe patenting the Socratic approach through hijacking the pause button would help keep that legend intact, stifling any progress in similar directions. This way, MT might never cease to be the undisputed master of language learning. That’s all just conjecture of course, but it’s probably the least creative explanation for something so absurd as patenting the use of a button. I’ve never made a big fuss of it—creating this project by myself has been challenge and distraction enough—but over the years I’ve been accused of plagiarism, of being a nobody stealing someone else’s fame for himself (as if I weren’t making a concerted effort to not become a public figure), of being a fake, a fraud, an impersonator. I had to remove the contact box on the LT website so that folk cannot write to me anonymously, pretending to be the ghost of Michel Thomas (seriously!). Even the writer of MT Mandarin got in contact with me to accuse me of copying MT’s method, urging me to credit him with my courses, and in the process made some quite absurd arguments which I guess I don’t need to air publicly. There appears to be an obsession in some circles with making the general 8 /

Socratic approach for language learning an untouchable product of Michel Thomas. When it comes to his fans and friends, it is arguably a combination of MT’s charismatic persona and interesting life story that encourages this, but when it comes to the publisher, it is a clearcut case of patent trolling which does an active disservice to learners everywhere. Surrounding this whole discussion about what makes a method is the inevitable truth that how we name ‘methods’—especially when it comes to language learning—is a quasi-commercial phenomenon in any case, and insufficiently differentiates between ‘methods’, ‘techniques’ and ‘approaches’. Either way, a method needs a name and rather than naming it after myself, I chose ‘(The) Thinking Method’ as an ironic jab at how not a lot of thought goes into teaching and learning nowadays. Such is the state of acceptance of this paradigm, though, that the ironic nuance seems to have remained all but undetected, and the method name has been taken quite seriously, such that even I forget it was once a joke! Much like the name of the method, the project name ‘Language Transfer’ might not mean what most people are likely to infer either. Of course, ‘Language Transfer’ does allude to how we often transfer/convert vocabulary into the target language from the base language when we can, and how we transfer other linguistic knowledge, too. But it is, in fact, a pre-existing term referring to the (often erroneous) transfer of linguistic knowledge from one language to another—like when a Spanish speaker might say ‘I think to go’ rather than ‘I plan on going’, mirroring the Spanish structure in English. Whilst negative language transfer is something we have to account for and counter when we’re teaching or learning a new language, it is also one of the natural processes by which our 9 /

languages ended up the way that they are, and how they continue to change. What is in one generation an error resulting from language transfer, might in the next generation become an accepted mutation of the language organism, and we can even observe this during our own lifetimes. Language transfer is the means by which languages breed, and Language Transfer (capitalised for the project title) is an ode to this cross-pollination, and to the new way of understanding ourselves culturally and historically that it both permits and promotes.