Silent Way (SW)

A.    Background

Silent Way is a method of language teaching devised by Caleb Gattegno in 1954. The first book containing this method is Teaching Foreign Language in Schools: The Silent Way “which was revised into” The Common Sense of Teaching a Foreign language”, thirteen years later. Gateggno is famous for his Cuisenaire rods and his series of words in color.

The Silent Way represents Gattegno’s venture into the field of foreign language teaching. It uses color charts and colored Cuisenaire rods which were developed first by George Cuisenaire.

B.     Hypotheses

The learning hypotheses underlying Gattegno’s work are:

• Learning is facilitated if the learners discover or create.
• Learning is facilitated by accompanying physical objects.
• Learning is facilitated by problem solving.

There are two traditions of teaching:

• Expository mode. In expository mode, the  teacher is an expository and the learners are listeners.
• Hypothetical mode. In this mode, the teacher and the students are in a more cooperative position.

Silent Way belongs to the hypothetical mode which views learning as a problem solving, creative discovering activity. There are four benefits of discovery learning:

•  The increase in intellectual potency.
•  The shift from extrinsic to intrinsic rewards.
• The learning of heuristic by discovering.
• The aid to conserving memory.

The rods and the colored charts of pronunciation provide physical foci for student’s learning and create memorable images to facilitate his/her recall. Silent Way is also related to a set of premises calied “problem solving approaches to learning”. It is expected to become independent, autonomous and responsible. In other words, a good problem solver in the language.

C.     Principles

• The first language acquisition is different from the second language acquisition.
• The child’s mind equips itself more and more edequately by its own working, trial and error and deliberate experimentation by suspending judgments and revising conclusions.
•   The student must be given the opportunity to listen to the target language melody.
•  Language acquisition must be done by the student himself.
• The teacher should be silent more, except when he exposits the new materials.
• Method used is artificial and highly controlled.
• Materials are presented with verbal media, but instruction and correction are not done orally.
• Vocabulary items are limited.
• The teacher corrects the student’s mistakes if the other students cannot correct them.

The media used are rods, a Fidel Charts and a Wall chart. Each of them has several advantages. The benefits of rods are:

• The L1 use can be avoided.
• The simple linguistic from can be created.
• The student’s intellectual potency can be increased.
• The teacher pays much attention to the student’s utterances.

 The fiddle charts consists of vowels and consonants and the wall chart consists of functional words.

D.    Approach

• Theory of Language

Silent Way takes a structural approach to the organization of language to be taught. Language is seen as groups of sounds arbitrary associated with specific meanings and organized into sentence or strings of meaningful units by grammar rules. Vocabulary as a central dimension of language learning has several classes:

1. Semi luxury vocabulary consists of common expressions in daily life.
2. Luxury vocabulary communicates more specialized ideas.
3. Functional vocabulary provides a key to comprehending the “spirit” of the language.

• Theory of Learning

Successful learning involves commitments of the self to language acquisition through the use of silent awareness and active trials. Gattegno’s emphasis on the primacy of over teaching places on the self of the learner, on the learner’s priorities and commitments. The self consists of two systems:

1. The learning system which is activated by way of intelligent awareness.
2. The retaining system which allows the students to remember and recall the linguistic elements and their organizing principles which makes the linguistic communication possible.

Silence is a key to triggering awareness and the preferred path to retention. Silent Way learners acquire “inner criteria” which play a central role in one’s education. These inner criteria allow learners to monitor and selfcorrect their own production. Silent way learning claims to consolidate the human dimensions of being and to include variety and individuality as essential factors for an acceptance of other as contributors to one’s own life.

E.     Usual Classroom Techniques

On the first day the teacher takes a box of colored rods to the class. He picks a red rod which is short while saying “rod”. Then he picks a longer green rod and says “rod”. Later, he picks a longer blue rod and says “rod” is a piece of wood.

After some examples, the teacher signs the students to imitate, then the students are asked to say the word individually. Adjective can also be taught in the some way. During the first lesson, there are only there words taught: take, give and put.

F.      Designs

• Objective

The general objective of Silent Way is to give beginning level students oral and aural facilities in the basic elements of the target language. The general goal is near native fluency in the target language: correct pronunciation and mastery of the prosodic elements of the target language are emphasized. An intermediate objective is to provide learners with a basic knowledge of grammar rules.

• Syllabus

Silent Way adopts a basically structural syllabus with lessons planned around grammatical items and related vocabularies.There is no general Silent Way syllabus, but language items are introduced according to their grammatical complexity.Vocabulary is selected according to the degree to which it can be manipulated within a given structure and its productivity.

• Types of learning and teaching Activities

Learning tasks activities have the function of encouraging the students and shaping their oral responses without a direct oral instruction from the teacher. The teacher models a word, phrase, or sentence and then elicits the leaner’s responses. Then, the learners create their own utterances. The teacher’s modeling is minimal and much activity may be teacher directed.

• Learner Roles

Learners are expected to develop independence, autonomy and responsibility. Independent learners are those who are aware that they must depend on their own resources and realize that they can use the knowledge of their own language to open up something in a new language. The autonomous learner chooses proper expressions in a given set of circumstances.Responsible learners know that they have free will to choose among any sets of linguistic choices. It is said to be the evidence of responsibility.

Learners have to play various roles. At times one is an in dependent individual, at other times a group member. Also, a learner must be a teacher, a student, a part of a support system, a problem solver and self evaluator.

• Teacher Roles

The Silent Way teacher’s tasks are:

1. To teach. Teaching means the presentation of typically using nonverbal clues to get across meanings.
2. To test. Testing means the elicitation and shaping of the student’s production silently.
3. To get out of the way. The teacher silently monitors learner’s interaction with each other and may leave the room while learners struggle with their new linguistic tools.

Teachers are responsible for designing teaching sequences, creating individual lesson elements, and creating an environment that encourages the student risk taking and that facilitates learning.

• Roles of Instructional Materials

The materials consist mainly of asset of colored rods, color coded pronunciation and vocabulary charts designed for manipulation in promoting the language learning by direct associations.

G.    Result

Gattegno claimed that in a year the students could master the language which was able to be taught four years by using other methods.