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Learning English on the Street - A short message for ESL teachers
It all started over a decade ago when a group of American and British ESL teachers at the Marzio School in the south of France noticed that the traditional materials they were using from the Big Publishers to teach their students simply weren't doing the job they were designed for.
Classroom English is all too often "perfect" with slow short phrases spoken on the audio and video materials used with students. This is fine until the learners actually meet genuine Americans, British people, and other Anglo-Saxons, to discover that nobody, in the real world, speaks "classroom English".
Michael Marzio and his friends & teachers started interviewing people on the streets of the USA, Great Britain, and other countries during school vacations, came back to his language center in France, and edited the video according to classic grammar structures & functions, in order to make the spontaneous, authentic, seemingly fast speech usable by different levels of students, including beginners.
The idea was to take the shock out of hearing real English for the first time. Since our students now watch and listen to real people, the shock is built into the method itself, saving learners many hours of frustration during their first weeks and months in new English-speaking environments.
Real English is based on a very simple idea, the organization of spontaneous speech. There are no actors here. All the people in the videos are simply being themselves, speaking normally.
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