Chronology of Silent Way

By Category: Approaches to Language-Teaching

In Friday’s class we broke apart the process of Silent Way as taught by Beverly.

  1. She shook the box of rods and tilted it toward us so we could see the colors in side.
  2. She took out one. “‘N Staafi,” she said: A rod, and held it up for us all to see.
  3. Then she showed us one color: blo. She picked it on purpose because it’s a cognate for our “blue,” to be sure we knew she was talking about colors rather than relative size or something else. Once we knew that, she could introduce the other colors, one at a time.
  4. Then she had us take and give the rods to each other: give David a blue rod, for example.
  5. Then she added numbers: one, two three.
  6. She used her fingers frequently, either to identify the syllable she’d like us to pronounce better, or to point to the word in the sentence that needed work.
  7. She did a lot of eliciting, using body language, input from the students, having them guess what a new color was. Sometimes people came close, if they knew German.

Some final Silent Way notes

  • Don’t do what the learners can do themselves. Let the other students model rather than the teacher.
  • Sound/rhythm of language is important.
  • Manipulatives communicate vocab, relationships, descriptors. Later, verbs tenses and more.
  • Energy of group important: affective filter
  • Learners: first listen to their teacher and then, mostly, to their peers.
  • This is key: Make meaning perceptible.
  • Do comprehension-checking questions: CCQs. With Silent Way, since it’s TPR related, students show comprehension by doing.
  • Objective: to move student from teacher direction to peer direction to development of own inner criteria.
  • Gattegno believed affective filter if students are fully engaged.
  • For pacing so everyone keeps up, break into smaller groups.
  • Donald Freeman has a demonstration on YouTube about how to furnish a room. Steve Cornwell has one in which he taught phonology to intermediate Japanese students at the college level.
  • Using your hand is very important.
  • Stress and intonation are more important than individual phonemes