Wednesday, October 12, 2005

Another view of Berlitz from Thailand.

Think what I say about Berlitz is tough? Read this from a popular EFL website in Bangkok. http://www.ajarn.com/Education/Language_Schools/Stickman/review

Berlitz

The producer of excellent phrase books and tapes has two schools in Bangkok. Berlitz has developed their own system for language teaching that uses very few of the accepted practices and works on a kind of "drill it into the brain and hope the students remember it" approach. Many "sex tourists" work here and this school will take ANYONE who walks through the door wearing a shirt and tie. They have a mandatory one week unpaid training course to complete before you start working for them - about 50% of people who do the course stay on to work there.

Within their buildings they have microphones in all of the classrooms that allow the branch manager to listen in and hear what the class / teacher are doing / saying. There are regular checks to ensure that you are following the Berlitz way and you will be condemned if you are teaching using anything other than the fixed narrow minded and downright stupid Berlitz approach. Needless to say, this school is for unqualified teachers.

This school is for those with no teaching qualifications and no desire to think about what they have to do. If this is you, it's probably your dream job.....sex tourists take note!



This sounds so true...just like Japan, although Berlitz has claimed to have moved away from the old Direct and audiolinguistic methods they used until a few years ago. Now they claim to be using the commuincative approach, but nobody there understands it at all. It takes a little more than 1 week of half-assed training to use that complex approach.

Yea, take classes there. A lot of people do and enjoy it. Berlitz makes a lot of bucks for doing it. The Japanese lap it up. It is "fun" and "teachers" correct a lot.

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