Some days ago, I looked for some information about silence and its
importance for teaching. I found two or three interesting things on this topic
but I especially like one of them. It is possible that this will be studied in
class in the followings weeks but I would like to share it with you because it
is a curious language teaching method.
This method is called “The Silent way” and was created by Caleb Gattegno.
It consists of a curious way of teaching where silence is extremely important
so it is related to Unit 0 that we have studied.
The teacher is silent for most of the time and students have to try to
speak in the language studied as much as possible. The session starts from what
the students know because they are the main characters and they are the ones who
want to learn a new language.
Most of the activities used in this method are speaking, pronunciation
and vocabulary. It avoids using memorization and imitation activities. The
materials that the teacher uses are very curious, for instance; sound-colour
chart (for phonics), pronunciation and vocabulary rods, etc.
The teacher, who is in total silence, uses non-verbal gestures to guide
the class. There are different signs to represent “Stop”, “Repeat”, “Speak
louder”, etc. Students learn a new language without imitating the teacher and
they develop their autonomy and their creativity.
The contents that students learn are reviewed and recycled over and over
so they work with new vocabulary and grammar structures without forgetting the
old ones. However, I think that this method was created for small groups but it
cannot be used in big groups: Will all the students work if the teacher is
silent? Besides, I believe that it could be useful in advanced levels but I
don’t know if we could use it with twenty five children.
This quote summarizes the methodology of the “The Silent Way” Method:
“The teacher works with students; the
students work on the language”
Caleb Gattegno
The following webs are good to get more information:
(Gonzalo García)
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ResponderEliminarThanks a million Gonzalo for these notes about the silent way method. For sure this will be usefull to make us thinking about this theme :)
ResponderEliminarThank you very much Gonzalo, as Victor has just said, I'm quite sure that all this information as well as the webpages (blogs)are really interesting and are a good summarize of the silent way.
ResponderEliminarThanks for sharing all this information with us Gonzalo. I have also investigated about this topic and I found out just one little thing different than yours. As you have said abouve, this method improves the learning of a new language. You have also added that it is a good methodology to learn new vocabulary and improve pronunciation. I found out a different thing. My web-page said that this method has two negative points: It does not take into account neither pronunciation nor listening comprehension. That makes sense to me; if you are not hearing at the person who really know how to pronounce the new words, how are you going to learn their pronunciation properly? You may be making mistakes. What do you think guys?
ResponderEliminarI totally agree with you Gonzalo, I would not use this method in my class, the group would be too numerous to make a profit of this method. Besides, I also agree with the fact that using this method with small children would not be very efficient because they would not know contents enough to continue learning. Furthermore, as I see it, small children would not be able to focus for an hour in the class if the teacher does not talk at all. They would get distracted and most of them, if they do not have a proper level or they have some learning difficulties, they would get lost which means that they would not learn anything.
Thanks to you all, you are wonderful!!!!! I do have some ideas about this, but I'll share them with you some time on a Thursday. After all, this is gonna be part of our final exam.
ResponderEliminar