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Language Learning for Beginners

The Silent Way is a language teaching method developed by Galeb Gattegno based on the premises that the teacher should speak as little as possible and encourage students to produce language. The teacher uses visual aids like colored rods and charts to elicit student responses without direct instruction. The goal is for students to learn through discovery, problem-solving, and relying on themselves and their peers to correct one another.

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1K views2 pages

Language Learning for Beginners

The Silent Way is a language teaching method developed by Galeb Gattegno based on the premises that the teacher should speak as little as possible and encourage students to produce language. The teacher uses visual aids like colored rods and charts to elicit student responses without direct instruction. The goal is for students to learn through discovery, problem-solving, and relying on themselves and their peers to correct one another.

Uploaded by

ancuta
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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4.

The Silent Way

- The Silent Way is the name o f a method of language teaching devised by Galeb
Gattegno.
- It is based on the premise that the teacher should be silent as much as possible in the
classroom but the learner should be encouraged to produce as much language as
possible;
- Gattegno's learning hypotheses could be stated as follows:
1. LEARNING is facilitated if the learner discovers or creates rather than remembers
and repeats what is to be learned;
2. LEARNING is facilitated by accompanying physical objects;
3. LEARNING is facilitated by problem solving involving the material to be learned;
The general objective of the Silent Way is to give beginning-level students oral and
aural facility in basic elements of the target language;
An immediate objective is to provide the learner with a basic practical knowledge of
the grammar;
- Learning tasks and activities in the Silent Way have the function of encouraging and
shaping student oral response without direct oral instruction from the teacher; teacher
modeling is minimal; responses to commands, questions, and visual cues constitute the
basis for the classroom activities;
- Learners are expected to develop independence, autonomy and responsibility;
- the absence of correction requires the students to correct themselves;
- the absence of explanations requires learners to make generalizations, come to their
own conclusions and formulate whatever rules they themselves feel they need;
- learners have to rely on themselves and on the group; they need to feel comfortable
both correcting one another and being corrected by one another;
- The teacher uses gestures, charts, and manipulatives in order to elicit and shape
student responses and so must be both facile and creative;
- Silent Way materials consist mainly of a set of colored rods (ace), color-coded
pronunciation and vocabulary wall charts, a pointer, and reading/writing exercises, all
of which are used to illustrate the relationships between sound and meaning in the
target language;
- the pronunciation charts, called FIDELS contain symbols in the target language for
all the vowel and consonant sounds of the language; the symbols are color-coded
according to pronunciation;
- just as the Fidel Charts are used to visually illustrate pronunciation, the colored
Cuisenaire
rods are used to directly link words and structures with their meanings in the target
language, avoiding translation into the native language;

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