The Silent Way Teaching Method

The Chomskyan criticism of the
theories upon which the
audiolingual method was
founded led to an interest in not
only the affective factors but also
in the cognitive factors. While
Community Language Learning,
drawing from Carl Roger’s
philosophy, focused on the
importance of the affect, new
methods were developed in the
70s to highlight the cognitive
domain in language learning.
The Silent Way is one of these
innovative methods. In Fact,
Caleb Gattegno, the founder of
the Silent Way,devoted his
thinking to the importance of
problem solving approach in
education. He contends that the
method is constructivist and
leads the learners to develop
their own conceptual models of
all the aspects of the language.
The best way of achieving this is
to help students to be
experimental learners.

Features

The Silent Way is characterized
by its focus on discovery,
creativity, problem solving and
the use of accompanying
materials. Richards and Rodgers
(1986:99)  summarized the
method into three major
features.

Learning is facilitated if the
learner discovers or
creates. The Silent way
belongs to the tradition of
teaching that favors
hypothetical mode of
teaching (as opposed to
expository mode of teaching)
in which the teacher and the
learner work cooperatively to
reach the educational
desired goals. (cf Bruner
1966.) The learner is not  a
bench bound listener but an
active contributor to the
learning process.
Learning is facilitated by
accompanying (mediating)
physical objects . The Silent
Way uses colorful charts and
rods (cuisenaire rods) which
are of varying length. They
are used to introduce
vocabulary ( colors,
numbers, adjectives, verbs)
and syntax (tense,
comparatives, plurals, word
order …)
Learning is facilitated by
problem solving involving
the material to be learned .
This can be summarized by
Benjamin Franklin’s words:

“Tell me and I forget
Teach me and I remember
Involve me and I learn”
A good silent way learner is
a good problem solver. The
teacher’s role resides only  in
giving minimum repetitions
and correction, remaining
silent most of the times,
leaving the learner struggling
to solve problems about the
language and get a grasp of
its mechanism.

Disadvantages

The Silent Way is often
criticized of being a harsh
method.

The learner works in
isolation and
communication is lacking
badly in a Silent Way
classroom.

With minimum help on the
part of the teacher, the Silent
Way method may put the
learning itself at stake.

The material ( the rods and
the charts) used in this
method will certainly fail to
introduce all aspects of
language.

Advantages

Learning through problem
solving looks attractive
especially because it fosters:

creativity,
discovery,
increase in intelligent
potency and
long term memory.

The indirect role of the
teacher highlights the
importance and the centrality
of the learner who is
responsible in figuring out
and testing the hypotheses
about how language works.
In other words teaching is
subordinated to learning.