A Teacher's thoughts :
The Silent Way Method
| The following informal thoughts, opinions and info about The Silent Way Method of teaching English were culled from email correspondence with Deni Harding, an experienced community college ESL instructor. The topics of Silent Way and teaching reading flow seamlessly into one another, so the last paragraph of Deni's Silent Way discussion is the first paragraph of her discussion on how to teach reading. |
I guess not. I've taught TPR before. TPR isn't bad for beginners but it loses its virtue as their skill level progresses... Silent Way isn't like TPR because TPR makes so much use of teacher modeling. Silent Way puts the teacher out of the transaction. By that I mean, perhaps the teacher models the first time, but ever after that uses her teacherly authority to direct attention to the students who have the desired response. Students then learn to rely on their classmates rather than on parroting the teacher.
But Silent Way (SW) can become a religion, too -- just as you said about TPR. I try to keep it as just an attitude that I hold. That way I can free myself from bossing the students around with busy work. Instead, I try to present things inductively, and then stand back and let them practice. Of course, lots of mistakes are always made, as when anyone is learning anything. but if I am really SW-ing, I can deal with that and encourage students to feel all right about making those mistakes because they will gradually become fewer. If I am sure they don't know something, then I give them the correct whatever-it-is. I find Asian students are particularly uncomfortable with this kind of teaching, since they are, as you said, so teacher-centered. However, when you are living and studying in the target language environment, there are plenty of times when you have to function on your own, with whatever small knowledge you may have, just to get from point A to point B, so I like to think the SW classroom is just a microcosm of the outside world, a microcosm fitted with a microscope: me.
I also use a set of wall charts called Words in Color, developed by Caleb Gattegno, late founder of SW. He wanted to create a universal color code so that all languages could be read within the set of colors he assigned to sounds. (He did it, by the way. His Sound-Color charts exist for many of the world's languages. When you know that white is "ah" as in honest, you can read that sound in any language, regardless of the letters or pictograms that encode it.) I know this sounds complex. But the fact is, the letter A has eleven discreet sounds in American English, and the other vowels nearly as many. Seeing these sounds as eleven different colors actually helps students hear and then produce them. It doesn't take a class long to internalize this and thereafter read laugh or plaid, was, swamp, about, village, any, all, far, care, war, and late with those eleven distinctions. Broadly speaking, this part of SW is centered on phonics. Of course, learning to read a color, say white, for the A sounds in laugh and plaid, or a blue A for any or many may confuse students who are not going to meet colors in black-and-white print, at least in the SW classroom they can make the connection. I find it easier to work on decoding skills this way.
Text copyrightDeni Johnson Harding
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