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 supposedly 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 and other countries during his vacations, came back to his
school in France, and edited the video according to classic grammar structures
and 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.
The first results were in the form of video cassettes (now DVDs) & CD-ROMs. We now concentrate on web video and interactive web lessons for students.
2008 has been a year of consolidation, while we make new exercises and throw out the old ones. We filmed in New York, Miami Beach, and Seattle, Washington. We will be doing more filming soon in 2009.
direct access to the videos and lessons
