SILENT WAY

The Silent Way is commonly defined as a teaching method for foreign languages in which the teachers are mostly silent and use rods and charts as their main teaching tools. Although Silent Way teachers do use rods and charts most of the time there can be Silent Way teaching without these tools while at the same time there may be teachers who use the suggested tools but do not really follow the Silent Way.

The confusion occurs when the Silent Way is understood as a teaching method rather than an approach to teaching.

Method refers to “an overall plan for the orderly presentation of language material, no part of which contradicts, and all of which is based upon, the selected approach. An approach is axiomatic, a method is procedural.” (E. Anthony, “Approach, method and technique,” English Language Teaching, 17:2, 1963)

Approach refers to “a set of correlative assumptions dealing with the nature of language and the nature of language teaching and learning. An approach is axiomatic... It states a point of view, a philosophy....” (Anthony)

Gattegno used the same approach to teaching for mathematics, reading and writing, languages, and other school subjects. I would consider the common characteristic of all these approaches to be what Gattegno called “The Subordination of Teaching to Learning.” The Silent Way is the name that is given to the subordination of teaching to learning when it is applied to foreign languages. Subordination of teaching to learning means making the learners’ needs the focus of one’s teaching. Gattegno used to say, “I teach people and they learn the language.” This means that the teacher and the student focus on different things during the lesson. It is the students’ job to direct their learning; it is the teacher’s job to work on the students by presenting language in such ways that force awareness and presence to the moment.

In the Silent Way classroom, the subordination of teaching to learning can be implemented according to the following sequence of steps:

1. Student experiments with the language. S/he produces a sentence, grammatical construction, sound combination.
2. Teacher gives feedback on the experiment by indicating the presence of a mistake or inadequacy. This feedback represents the teacher’s own experiment or trial. Note that the feedback never involves the correction of the mistake, but only an indication of where the mistake is.
3. Student produces an additional experiment, trying to correct herself or himself, which provides feedback to the teacher.
4. Teacher deduces from the produced sentence whether his/her trial was appropriate/helpful.
5. The cycle continues until the student’s utterance is adequate, correct and true.