Michel Thomas

In the final week of World War II, Thomas was instrumental in rescuing from destruction a cache of Nazi documents that had been shipped by the Gestapo to be pulped at a paper mill in Freimann, Germany. These included the worldwide membership card file of more than ten million members of the Nazi party.^[5]

After the end of the war, Thomas learned that his parents and most of his extended family had been murdered in Auschwitz.^[1]

Post-war years

In 1947, Thomas emigrated to

He remained unmarried until 1978 when he wedded Los Angeles schoolteacher Alice Burns; the couple had a son and daughter before the marriage ended in a divorce.[8]

Thomas's clients included diplomats, industrialists, and celebrities.^[6] The success of the school led to tours and a second school in New York City, as well as a series of instructional books and tapes in French, Spanish, German, and Italian.^[9] At the time of his death in 2005, Thomas's tapes, CDs, and books were the leading method of recorded language-learning in the United Kingdom.^[10]

In 1997, Thomas participated in a

In 2001, when the Los Angeles Times published a profile casting doubts about Thomas's war record,^[12] he unsuccessfully sued the newspaper for defamation.

In a seemingly contradictory U.S. District Court ruling, Judge Audrey Collins said that although readers of the article might conclude that Thomas lied about his wartime experiences, the newspaper didn’t actually intend to convey that implication:

"A reasonable reader or juror might conclude, after reading the article and considering the various points of view presented, that Thomas had in fact lied about his past. But no reasonable juror could find that Defendants intended to convey that impression."

National World War II Memorial in Washington, D.C., on May 25, 2004 — the week the Memorial was dedicated. ^[16] The following day, Thomas was honored as a liberator of the Dachau concentration camp at the US Holocaust Memorial at a Salute to Liberators event.[2]

Death

Thomas died of cardiac failure at his home in New York City on January 8, 2005, aged 90.[17]

Polyglot linguist

Michel Thomas is known to have been fluent in seven tongues: Polish, English, French, Spanish, Italian, German and Yiddish. Some reports state that he could speak another five, but precisely which ones is unclear.

Michel Thomas method

Michel Thomas was a language teacher with a specific approach to teaching. Thomas proposed that there is no such thing as a student with learning difficulties, only teachers with teaching difficulties.^[18] According to Dr. Jonathan Solity of University College London, Thomas held that there are three critical components of the teaching environment:

1. "The first is the analysis of the material to be learned. If the analysis is correct, teaching is easier and the subsequent learning of the pupil ensured."
2. "The second is isolating and structuring the most useful information to teach so that there is a logical progression in the skills, knowledge and concepts taught. Easier skills are taught before more difficult ones and useful information is taught before less useful information. In this context useful information is defined in terms of its generalisability and wider applicability."
3. "The third component of the learning environment is determining the best way of presenting skills, knowledge and concepts to students so that learning is facilitated."^[18]

The method presents the target language by interleaving new with old material, teaching generalization from language principles, contextual diversity, and learning self-correction in an environment that attempts to be stress-free, as the teacher is responsible for learning, not the student.^[19]

Thomas felt his method would "change the world"; he only started with languages as he felt that it was the most alien thing a person could learn. Solity claims the method "has huge implications for teaching anybody anything".^[20]

References

1. ^
   ISBN 0-07-149911-3
2. ^ "BARBIE PROSECUTOR DEMANDS LIFE TERM". Chicago Tribune. July 1987. Retrieved 2022-08-16.
3. ^ ^{a b} "Michel Thomas". www.michelthomas.org. Retrieved March 16, 2019.
4. ^ Los Angeles Daily News, "'Hangman of Dachau' tries to blackmail war hero", by Sara Boynhoff, February 17, 1950.
5. ^ “In the final week of World War II, Michel Thomas, a Jewish concentration camp inmate who had escaped the Nazis and joined the U.S. Army Counter Intelligence Corps as it swept into Germany, received a tip about a convoy of trucks in the vicinity of Munich said to be carrying unknown, but possibly valuable cargo. Thomas went to the trucks' destination, where he discovered an empty warehouse filled with veritable mountains of documents and cards with photos attached. He had come upon the complete worldwide membership files of the Nazi Party, which had been sent to the mill to be destroyed on the orders of the Nazi leadership in Berlin. Thomas and others ensured that the documents were protected. Prosecutors at Nuremberg found invaluable evidence in these files, as have generations of prosecutors since that time.”[1]
6. ^
   Daily Telegraph, archived from the original
   on December 21, 2007
7. ^ Flintoff, John-Paul (March 27, 2004), "The Man Who'd Like to Teach the World to Talk", Financial Times, archived from the original on December 21, 2007, retrieved August 15, 2007
8. ^ "Michel Thomas". January 13, 2005. Retrieved March 16, 2019 – via www.telegraph.co.uk.
9. Daily Telegraph
10. ^ Campbell, Sophie (February 5, 2005), "Now Repeat After Me", The Daily Telegraph, archived from the original on December 21, 2007
11. ^ The Language Master Archived 2010-02-06 at the Wayback Machine at the British Film Institute Film & TV Database
12. ^ Los Angeles Times, "Larger Than Life," by Roy Rivenburg, April 15, 2001
13. ^ "Thomas v. Los Angeles Times | California Anti-SLAPP Project". 2011-05-31. Retrieved 2022-08-16.
14. ^ "Michel Thomas". www.michelthomas.org. Retrieved March 16, 2019.
15. ^ Silver Star Citation at web site of US Rep. Carolyn Maloney, (D-NY)"
16. ^ "Sixty years after nomination, veteran gets Silver Star at WWII memorial". www.freerepublic.com. Retrieved March 16, 2019.
17. ^ "Michel Thomas Dies - The Washington Post". The Washington Post.
18. ^ ^{a b} P.79, Jonathan Solity, The Learning Revolution, Hodder Educational, London, 2008.
19. ^ P.109-123, Jonathan Solity, The Learning Revolution, Hodder Educational, London, 2008.
20. ^ Lipsett, Anthea (September 1, 2008). "Anthea Lipsett on the teaching methods of legendary language guru Michel Thomas". The Guardian. Retrieved March 16, 2019 – via www.theguardian.com.

External links

Wikiquote has quotations related to Michel Thomas.

• Official site
• New York Times May 22, 2013 'Forgotten Heroes' obituary
• Guardian Obituary by Christopher Robbins, author of Thomas's biography
• Washington Post Obituary by Adam Bernstein