Metodika final exam. What is linguo-cultural teaching and learning?

Strategies to make the Silent Way work for you and your students

The Silent Way is a discovery learning approach, proposed by Galeb Gattegno in the 50s of the last century. It is often considered to be one of the humanistic approaches. It is called The Silent Way because the teacher is usually silent, leaving room for students to talk and explore the language. It is often associated with Cuisenaire rods and wall charts where words are colour-coded; each phoneme a different colour.
The basic method that underlies this approach is simple but potentially quite powerful: In contrast to traditional methods, the emphasis is on the student’s learning rather than the teacher’s teaching. In fact, it is not uncommon for the teacher to remain silent for parts of a lesson.
In the absence of the teacher dominating the lesson, the student takes an active role in the learning process, and their input guides the learning trajectory. The teacher redirects and corrects when necessary, but the teacher grants students greater autonomy and fosters the development of independent problem-solving skills.

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    Why might you decide to use the Silent Way method?
    

The Silent Way is not for everyone. Here are some valid reasons for deciding not to use it.
• It may feel strange and scary to some students. It is safe to say that your students have never experienced anything quite like the Silent Way before. Without adequate explanation or preparation, they might be unsure of how to handle it, especially in the beginning.
• It may be challenging for some students. If a student has an IEP, or requires extra coaching or scaffolding due to special needs of any kind, they can really struggle with the Silent Way. These students need frequent interactions with their teacher in order to be successful.
• Students may feel that they are not getting enough feedback. While traditional teaching methods make extensive use of verbal and written feedback, the Silent Way does not. This means that students will have to adjust to the new way of receiving feedback, and they may feel insecure about the lack of verbal positive or negative reinforcement in the beginning.
• Progress may look different than with other methods. Advocates of the Silent Way will tell you that the focus is on learning a few things well rather than “covering” the material, but the Silent Way aims for quality rather than quantity. In other words, it may feel like students spend a lot of time learning the basics of vocabulary and pronunciation rather than progressing quickly through these topics, but remember that learning a language means developing many skills simultaneously. In fact, some skills such as accurate pronunciation may take years to master.

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