Michel Thomas Method

The Michel Thomas Method is an original method developed by Michel Thomas for teaching languages.

Thomas claimed that his students could "achieve in three days what is not achieved in two to three years at any college" ("three days" meaning sessions as long as eight or ten hours per day, although students claimed not to experience the lessons as over-intensive, but actually "enjoyable" and "exciting"), and that the students would be conversationally proficient.

Thomas was initially hired by celebrities and other public figures, such as Raquel Welch, Barbra Streisand, Emma Thompson, and Woody Allen; as well as by Grace Kelly following her engagement to Prince Rainier of Monaco to meet her need to learn French rapidly.

The method first rose to prominence in Britain, following a BBC television science documentary The Language Master, wherein Thomas taught French to sixth form students for five days at a further education college in London in 1997. As a result of the interest generated by this documentary, UK publisher Hodder and Stoughton commissioned Thomas to produce commercial versions of his courses.

The structure of Michel Thomas's lessons (the sequence of introductions of different skills and of individual examples) follows a good approximation of the logical principles of Direct Instruction as developed by Siegfried Engelmann and laid out in Engelmann and Carnine's Theory of Instruction: Principles and Applications.

Thomas was explicitly secretive about the details of his method and never published any details, so it is not known whether he ever consulted Engelmann's work or any Direct Instruction publications, although Jonathan Solity calls it "highly unlikely". Thomas may have redeveloped his approximation independently by starting from the same philosophical position (i.e., "If the learner hasn't learned, the teacher hasn't taught").

Also, Thomas graduated in philosophy (from the University of Bordeaux), so he may have studied John Stuart Mill's methods of inductive logic from A System of Logic. (Engelmann and Carnine state in Could John Stuart Mill Have Saved Our Schools? that the basics of their Theory of Instruction could have been developed by Mill himself if he had thought to apply his Methods to instructional examples, and in principle could even have been used to predict logically major findings in behaviorism related to classical and operant Conditioning, which historically were only discovered later as unexpected experimental results.)