Teaching Foreign Languages the Silent Way
Caleb Gattegno’s Unique Approach to Foreign Language Study
Feb 27, 2009
In 1963, an unpretentious booklet was published with the title Teaching Foreign Languages in Schools: The Silent Way by mathematician Caleb Gattegno (1911-1988), famed for having put the Cuisenaire rods into classrooms throughout the world.
Gattegno’s specialty was education through discovery and awareness. In the case of foreign language learning, he reasoned that most students walk into their classrooms with all the mental equipment needed to pick up new languages, simply because they had already learned their native tongue at a tender age – without the help of teachers and books.
Grammar the Silent Way
In the early 1960s, Gattegno and his associates were experimenting with ways to spark awareness through linguistic situations created with colored rods. For example, one student might tell another to take a rod and put it under, inside or behind a box. As the student attempts to give these instructions, the teacher’s job is to provide feedback on his or her pronunciation and grammar, and also to supply expressions the student doesn’t know or can’t guess.
In these game-like situations, the words spoken are not related to textbook exercises or translations, but to situations which are tactilely and visually verifiable.
It is quite easy to teach “difficult” grammar using the rods and to help students achieve remarkable precision in the use of important function words like did, it, of and than.
Examples of Grammar Taught with Cuisenaire rods
- How many red rods did Carlos take out of the box?
- Give her a rod which is shorter than a blue one but longer than a light green one.
- If I were to put a blue rod on top of the orange ones, would all of them fall?
Silent Way Word Charts
Charts with letters colored coded for pronunciation contain hundreds of function words which can be mastered using colored rods. These charts could be considered the closest thing to a curriculum guide for the Silent Way. Familiarity with these function words helps students build a strong base in grammar or pronunciation in a very short time, after which they can turn their attention to acquiring vocabulary.
Building Vocabulary the Silent Way
Gattegno devised ways to teach vocabulary that allow students to take in and retain a surprisingly large number of words in the space of an hour or two. These words are linked to a common theme which may be portrayed in a picture. Open-ended “restriction” word games allow the students to use the new vocabulary in imaginative ways.
Pronunciation and Spelling the Silent Way
While working for UNESCO in Ethiopia, Gattegno devised a new way of listing all the sounds of a language – as well as the various ways these can be spelled – in color-coded columns. In the hands of an expert, these Silent Way charts assist students in quickly achieving good pronunciation and provide them with a logical way to master spelling.
Silence and the Silent Way
Gattegno held that his approach was a common-sense way of teaching foreign languages in a classroom situation. The approach was tagged “The Silent Way” to disagree with theories that language learning takes place through repetition.
Gattegno proved that he could successfully teach numerous languages without modeling, in fact without speaking at all. However, Gattegno insisted that neither silence nor rods were essential to his approach, but rather a principle which he called “the subordination of teaching to learning.” This common-sense principle is, in fact, the very backbone of Caleb Gattegno’s "Silent Way".
Source: Silent-Way workshops conducted by Dr. Caleb Gattegno
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