About Real English Method

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 decided that the traditional materials they were using 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 tapes used with students. This is fine until the learners actually meet genuine Americans and other Anglo-Saxons, to discover that nobody, in the real world, speaks "classroom English".

Michael Marzio and his friends 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 grammar structures and functions, in order to make the spontaneous, authentic 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 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 interactivity for students.

2008 will be a year of consolidation, while we make new web lessons. We just finished early 2008 filming in Miami Beach.

The Marzio School teamed up with Future Work Systems to produce the online version of Real English. This partnership is called Real English L.L.C., and is based in New Jersey, USA.