The Callan Method

Listen up the ingreats.. If you manage to make a living from this method then stop moaning about it. If you do not like it stop doing it and leave it with people who like and know it works. If you teach this method and are totaly fed up with people knocking it all the time for being old fasioned or out of date, speak up. It is those people who do not like it who make the method less effective at the higher levels, not the method.
As for questions not being relivant in the modern world, eg wireless / oneself ect, try telling that to people who have yet to see a wireless or radio. The idea is that people will be able to communicate with all english speakers not professors.
If of course people wish to progress to a higher level they can always take further more advanced courses in English, if they do they will have a very firm grounding in English from Callan.
As for being morbid or sexist, well I ask you how foolish are you? There are few truths which we all share in this world, some are death, happiness, pain, sorrow and being male or female. Therefore it is easier to teach these common connections and differences in life to show how a language works than to dream up some libral happy family that does not exist and which some people would never see or have knowledge of and find quite alien.
I teach this method for a living, if you dont like it, get out and go and do something else, bus driving is well paid.
Ian, Warsaw, Poland.

hey doodles,
 I am in Salvador Brazil and I have been teaching this method for a year now in the only callan method school in this part of the country. Although it is a very strict method I am not a strict teacher and have been reprimanded several times for getting off the beaten path with my students. but I think a bit of creativity and giving aslternative answers is good for the students. for example I am an american by birth and the callan method books are british english so  I always tell my student when we come across something that is british native spoken and that in the united states no one speaks this we way I give them the alternative way to say it. for example, in the book they use the word "whilst" no one says "whilst" in the u.s. as the word "while" is native spoken in the u.s. and I tell them if they are going to use their english in the states it is better to speak this way so people wont think their english is odd. I have had very good results with this method with my private students and the students seem to like being able to spend 1 hour speaking instead of learning grammar. When you think about it, really, what is the use of knowing all the grammar rules when you havent the vocabulary to say anything?
Iansa
Salvador da Bahia, Brasil

this is an answer to a number of the posts above. i taught the callan method in  italy for a year 10 years ago and for a while in london. pros and cons? you can say that again...

but i don't want to repeat what has already been said. book one works quite well, although it is outdated to say the least. however, i do not believe that the callan method is intrinsically bad at teaching the higher levels; the difference between book one and the following books is more that callan never wrote book one himself; he ripped it off from a far more skilled collaborator of his 50 years ago. from book 2 to book 7 we witness a slow slide into the pig-minded delirium of a frustrated and self-obsessed sad little man. and i believe much of his life-long paranoid self-guardedness stems from the underlying knowledge that he has become famous for a method that he did not invent, and then had the presumption to be able to develop to higher levels without the slightest grounding in english language or grammar. and that's part of the reason that he wants inexperienced teachers (apart from paying a pittance!) he doesn't want critics!

we might say that the callan method has proved successful not because of callan, but despite callan. i do know people who have learnt well using the callan method, and so i thought, if someone so ignorant and presumptuous can teach people with these morbid, racist, outdated and generally highly insensitive questions from the upper books ("do students in your country help with the grain harvest?" c'mon... "Why do men go bald?" try asking that to a class of three prematurely bare-headed students and then coax them into saying that it's because of the tight headbands around their - '50s style - hats... please!) then what could i do, believing myself to be more mentally stable than callan and having a masters in italian and a degree in lingustistics?

while also working in other teaching settings - communicative teaching, univerisity teaching, company courses etc. - i have been developing my own question and answer method, designed specifically for the italian market (i don't intend to try and conquer the entire english-learning world) so as to exploit the underlying similarities between english and italian in terms of transformation, not translation - and this is something that the communicative method has never done because it requires bilingual teachers...far too expensive! both methods have always been guilty of thinking that it's better to pay teachers badly, and take whatever washes up, stick a book in their hand and shove them into the classroom. paying peanuts and getting monkeys is as true with callan as any other method. there are good and bad callan-style teachers: the good ones are those that use the method to teach, not those who are used by the method to prance around like nutty copies of robin callan...

my method uses modern, "international" english, deals with everyday and common situations in which students can then put the language into practice by phone or when travelling, and aims to offer space for open-ended answers even at a lower level. like the michel thomas method, it uses a far more relaxed environment than callan: in my school, we have chairs you don't mind sitting in for an hour after a day's work, lighting that doesn't give everyone a headache etc. i think people learn better if they are relaxed, but this doesn't mean they have to fall asleep or not be stimulated: input yes, but not military barking. oh, and max 5 students - i have taught with 14 in london and it's a joke. they might as well go and listen to passers-by in oxford street. the feedback i have had so far has been very positive. i invite other disillusioned callan teachers to stop moaning and try and do something better if they also feel that the method is a rolls royce engine in a battered ford escort..

so, in a word: the callan method - good method, shame about the callan. callan hit on something very powerful but was far too incompetent to capitalise on it and far too conceited to think it would be better to collaborate on a modern elaboration of the method with others. good bilingual teachers in a monlingual teaching environment who have understood the real method behind the madness should do what they can to put together something new that really works in the place and time they're in!

ps. by the way, does the london school still have those big-brother style microphones in the classrooms to make sure the teachers are doing their job? unbelieeeevable.

Hi!

I have experience with this method in Poland and thought it worked really well, especially for beginners. But when I taught in Poland, I taught at a private language school where class sizes never exceeded 12 people. I am planning to go to South Korea and would like to try using the Callan Method in a public school there. The problem is that there are 40 students in each class I heard. Do you think the Callan Method could work in such a class size?  Does anyone have experience of making the Callan Method working in big classes? Any information you could provide would be greatly appreciated:

Regards,

Andrew.

Well Anonymous (by the way, I like your name),

I'm someboy who has met a quite large number of people who have acquired a very high level of English as a second language. Interestingly enough, there wasn't one single person who said they learned English in a classroom. They all said that they had learned English by exposing themselves to authentic English on a daily basis. So how much authentic English is the average English exposed to when they attend an English class? What exactly can you learn in an English class?