Maximilian Berlitz

Maximilian Berlitz

April 14, 1852 – April 6, 1921

Dmitrenko Natalia

PLAN

1. Biography

2. The Direct Method

3. Berlitz Methodology

4. Berlitz Commercial

5. Literature

01 Biography

The son of a family of teachers and mathematicians, Maximilian Berlitz used his exceptional language skills to teach Greek, Latin and six other European languages.

According to the “Official History of the Berlitz Organization” published in 1978 to mark its centenary year, Maximilian Berlitz decided as a young immigrant (he was only in his late twenties) that the most promising future he could carve for himself in America was to use his skills as a teacher and his status as a native speaker of German and open a school of his own in Providence, Rhode Island.

He then advertised for an assistant who could speak French. The man who answered the advertisement was a young Frenchman, also a recent immigrant who had not learnt English, called Nicholas Joly. Berlitz, overworked by the exertion of getting the school going, fell ill and left the students to the mercies of the “untried” Joly.

Returning a month or so later and expecting to find his customers in a very dissatisfied frame of mind, Berlitz discovered to his amazement that young Joly was getting on very well and talking to them in French.

During the next 30 years, Berlitz built up a network of language schools, first in America and then back in Europe. By the end of the century he had 16 American schools and another 30 in Europe, more than half of them in his native Germany. There were 5 schools in England.

Map

02 The Direct Method

The principles of the Direct Method:

- L2 should be learnt the way one learns one's L1; - No L1 in the classroom; - emphasis on the spoken form. Speaking before writing; - inductive approach - no grammatical explanations; - use of the phonetics; - the sentence is the basic unit of language; - meanings to be learnt by direct association with objects, actions, etc.

The difficulties which led to criticism:

- it took a long time;- it needed good teachers; - students taught by Direct Method tended not to do very well at the exams; - writing and reading tended to be neglected; - students used translation themselves, even if teachers didn't.

03 Berlitz Methodology

His textbooks provided a framework within which the teachers he employed in his schools could work according to a predictable routine which would ensure, as far as possible, that all Berlitz Schools followed the same basic course patterns. He began with French anf German (1882), and English as a foreign language followed shortly afterwards. Then, Spanish and Italian appeared in the early 1890s and Russian, Dutch, Danish, Czech, and Hungarian had all been added by 1910 along with Swedish, Polish, Portugese, and Japanese.

Berlitz was not an academic methodologist, but he was an excellent systematizer of basic language teaching materials organised on ‘direct method’ lines. His biggest sellers run to 2 coursebooks, but none of them is really an advanced course, or even a high-intermediate one. Berlitz catered for beginners and provided them with a useful grounding in the language. All his books contain the same directions to the teacher, but this is as far as his methodological interests went. The teachers’ directions are very clear and straightforward: no translation under any circumstances (‘teachers are cautioned against the slightest compromise on this point’), a strong emphasis on oral work, avoidance of grammatical explanations until the late in the course, and the maximum use of question-and-answer techniques. His teachers were all native workers, a cardinal Berlitz principle, and this meant in practice that most of them were young and there was inevitably a high turnover of staff. Training could not go very deep, nor did Berlitz put many resources into it.

The Sample Lesson

BERLITZ TEXTBOOK

04 Berlitz Commercial

Berlitz Commercial

05 Literature

1. Основные направления в методике преподавания иностранных языков в XIX-XX вв. [Текст] / Под ред. чл.-кор. АПН СССР И. В. Рахманова. - Москва : Педагогика, 19722. A History of English Language Teaching (Oxford Applied Linguistics) by Howatt Anthony P. R. - 1984. 3. Language Teaching Methodology (a course of lectures for teachers and students of English). Modern History of Language Teaching Methods. St. Petersburg University Press. Irina Pavlovskaya. - 2001.

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