The Silent Way Method of Language Learning by Caleb Gattegno
Today, one of my readers asked me about The Silent Way approach to language learning, a method developed by Caleb Gattegno in the 1960’s. The Silent Way is such an interesting approach, as it trains the learner to become independent.
The Silent Way: A learner-friendly approach to language learning
The name Silent Way highlights the fact that the teacher remains silent (as much as possible) during the entire language training course. The teacher is not there to impart knowledge or to provide answers, but is there to facilitate discovery and awareness.
Based on prior skills, abilities and experiences of the students, teachers therefore strive to ensure that students can encounter discoveries, become aware of the facts of language, establish criteria for correctness, acquire the know-how, and above all, become independent in their learning.
Though silent most of the time, the teacher plays a crucial role. The teacher is there at every moment, speaking only when necessary but listening very intently. The teacher acts as the guarantor, safeguarding the accuracy of the language (pronunciation, vocabulary, syntax).
For the students, it is helpful that they are expected to develop a certain degree of self-awareness and that they can discover the language on their own — with very little help from the teacher — from testing things and making use of the materials provided by the teacher.
The Silent Way: Using materials as playful as they are powerful
If you’re a teacher thinking about trying out the Silent Way, here are some materials you can use inside the classroom:
- A sound / color chart consisting of rectangles of different colors, with each color corresponding to a sound (view examples).
- Word charts that contain the most critical 500 words of the language. The words are written in different colors. The use of color allows the student to correctly pronounce the language, especially character languages such as Chinese, Japanese or Russian.
- The Fidel table that helps students learn to read. It displays all possible spellings of each sound. Spellings are then grouped and color coded to indicate their pronunciation. The Fidel is particularly useful when the target language is problematic spelling, such as French and English.
- Strips of different colors used to create situations that will help the students understand how a particular concept is expressed in the language.
- Images (similar size to paintings) depicting scenes of everyday life. They invite learners to use their imagination. They thus serve to introduce everyday vocabulary and may encourage story-telling or generate discussion.
The Silent Way: In practice
A beginner level course or a basic course can start by working on the basic elements of the language: sounds, vocabulary, sentence construction. The materials described above are frequently used. In the first classes, teachers create situations in which students will work, but soon the students themselves will invent new situations by using the strips, or things that happen in class, or even their own lives (both personal and professional).
In an advanced course, students can be encouraged to discuss a topic of their choice. The work will then be on correcting their errors. The teacher does not correct errors but will help students to do that themselves, encouraging them to discuss the problem and to look for similar examples.
By giving the students the opportunity to explore their errors and difficulties, they can work on both the language and their own behavior as a learner. In addition, it builds the learner’s self-confidence. This is an interesting experience in itself, as evidenced by the intense involvement of students in a course delivered using the Silent Way.
The pleasure that the students derive from the class are then not dependent on activities “imported” into the language, such as songs, role-playing, and other games, but on the discovery of oneself through the deployment of mental ability in learning the language.
For the teacher, it is extremely important to always be “on alert” to ensure that the students always have a linguistic challenge in front of them.
Advantages and disadvantages of The Silent Way
Throughout this article, we’ve talked about the Silent Way in a positive light. The use of the Silent Way fosters a very high degree of interaction between the teacher and the students as well as among the students themselves and raises the participation of the students in class. The students cooperate and help each other out in class and, in this way, the social aspect of learning is supported.
While the Silent Way offers a lot of advantages, there are also disadvantages to this method. The Silent Way is a very abstract method to learn a language, very different from the commonly used methods of language learning. As a result, the learners have to engage themselves with the artificiality of the approach. The whole concept of the method and atmosphere in class may seem too abstract, so that learners may have difficulties to derive any benefit from it.
Furthermore, the Silent Way does not lend itself to having a large number of learners in one group. It is unlikely that a larger number of learners will be able to participate in class unless the teacher has provided them a really large number of materials.
If you’re a teacher or a student who has experienced the Silent Way, drop a comment below — I’d love to hear from you.
15 comments
Hi Karen,
The association Une Education Pour Demain has an English class starting on 17th August with 45 students aged from 10 to 70, plus 10 English teachers as observers.
On several occasion, I have also been in, or observed, Japanese classes with 40 or more students. Silent Way works very well for big classes, both for beginners and for more advanced students.
Hi Roslyn, thank you for your comment! Wow! 45 students in one class is indeed a large group. I’m really curious to hear how the classroom dynamics work with such a large group. Are the students split into smaller groups? How are the dynamics in class? I’d love to hear more!
The best fun I ever had as a teacher was using the Silent Way with an Intermediate class many years ago. Every week, I spent 1 day out of 5 using this technique. The students loved it and one, ten years later, commented about how much she “learned” during that hour.
Every teacher should try to be silent and teach class.
Hi ChinaMike, thanks for sharing your experience in teaching using the Silent Way!
I have not learned a language via the Silent Way, but I went to Harvard Business School for my MBA program. There, 100% of the classes are taught using the case method where the teacher tries to remain “silent” during the entire class. Like in the Silent Way, the teacher’s role is not to lecture or to impart knowledge, but rather to facilitate discovery. I enjoyed it very much and can definitely see how the Silent Way can be extremely effective in teaching languages. I am currently learning German and would love to find a class in the Greater Boston area that uses the Silent Way. If any of you can recommend a class, do let me know, as I am on the lookout for one!
I can definitely think of a thousand classes I took where a silent teacher would have greatly improved class!
Now your posting has made me curious. Why is a Harvard MBA posting about language learning? Don’t you have a bunch of spreadsheets to keep you busy?
Hi ChinaMike! I am just fascinated about language learning! On a side note, I am also the founder of two other companies. One is My Happy Planet — a free site where you can find and practice with native speakers. Another one is Language International — a place to find language immersion programs abroad. Feel free to check them out and give me feedback!
Ah, now I see how you are combining business and pleasure. Good for you. I’ll be curious to hear more thoughts from you on language learning.
Hi China Mike, I definitely feel fortunate that I have the opportunity to work on something that I love too
Thanks for stopping by my blog! And if you have some thoughts to share, I’d be happy to invite you to become a guest writer of this blog. The blog is still new, but I hope it becomes a great resource for both language teachers as well as language learners out there!
Thank you for the invite. Very hospitable of you
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[...] few days ago, I wrote about the Silent Way developed by Caleb Gattegno, a model that promotes the independence of the learner. This learning method is almost similar to [...]
Hi Karen,
The 5 day course is over, and went very well. In the end, there were almost 60 people present – 50 students and 10 observers. It was fun!
No, we didn’t really have group work, though we did use fishbowl situations twice. Even in these cases, the idea was to say who the class would be directed at, rather than restrict participation. The other students could participate if they wanted to, but their needs were not primary to the work done by the teacher. Most of the time, everyone worked together.
Almost everyone was a non beginner, though one person had a very low level indeed – about 50 hours of English before this week.
The fact that everything is so visual and tangible helps.
One of the rules of the game is, people should only make sentences which are true. They are then worked on and become correct. So people usually talk about themselves. It’s always personal, and not at all artificial or abstract – much less so than talking about, or pretending to be, the characters in a book, for example.
this post is very usefull thx!
I’ve recently started a blog, the information you provide on this site has helped me tremendously. Thank you for all of your time & work.
Wow! 60 people is a lot. I am glad to hear that you’ve had a positive experience teaching a large group using The Silent Way. Thanks for sharing your experience, Roslyn!
Hi everybody,
I was one of Roslyn’s co-teachers (there were 4 of us) on the course she mentions above with 60 people in the room but I’ve only just seen this forum.
I must say I was very nervous beforehand but it seem to go pretty well. We certainly laughed a lot.
Several of the people there have continued discussing the pedagogy on our Moodle platform: http://uepd.quizport.com/course/view.php?id=14. You’re all welcome to join in… if you read French.
Cheers,
Glenys
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