In Chapter 3 of Stevick’s Teaching Languages: A Way and Ways I expected to read about how to use colored cuisenaire rods to teach a foreign language. Instead, Stevick tries to explain Caleb Gattegno’s philosophy of learning.

Of course, Gattegno is the inventor of the Silent Way. Rather than bog down in a lengthy explanation, I’ll risk an analogy for Stevick’s discussion in Chapter 3. Gattegno is diametrically opposed to the idea of a teacher filling students up with “facts? as if they were empty bottles. A learner must actively appropriate new information and integrate it into her Self. She changes the Self in order to adjust to a world made different by the new information. According to Gattegno, there are 3 qualities of the Self which education should recognize : independence, autonomy, and responsibility. I guess we could say that Gattegno’s learner must choose to engage the new reality of the foreign language and adjust her personality so that it takes account of, and copes with the new language.

So, Silent Way teachers are?well?silent so that a student will be forced to figure out the language largely on his own, perhaps comparing his hypotheses to those of other students, but with a minimum of guidance from the teacher. In fact, when students are correct, the teacher does not use any kind of gesture or affirmative words to confirm that “correctness.? He simply continues with the lesson in a matter-of-fact manner. In the event of an error, motions with hand or pointer may indicate that something “needs to be worked on.? Students have to do the work of learning. They have to take the responsibility of integrating the new knowledge into their Selves.

In Chapter 4, Stevick lays out some of the specific teaching techniques of Silent Way teachers. Students are first presented with a “Fidel??a chart of all the spellings for all the syllables of the students? native language. They pronounce these syllables first in chorus, then individually. The syllables are color-coded so that symbols which should be pronounced alike have the same color.

They then practice pronouncing a Fidel with foreign language syllables, using their knowledge of colors to figure out the pronunciation. When they encounter a syllable which had no equivalent in their native language, the teacher may give them one, clear audible example of the sound. Silent Way students had better pay attention to what’s going on! No repeats for them!

Anyway, additional charts introduce common words that have been carefully chosen, and these charts include the words for numerals. In the third phase, the teacher uses different-length and different-colored rods plus gestures and a very few spoken words to teach numbers, colors, relative locations, and whatever grammatical structures the students need.

At least for the first stages of language learning, it’s fairly easy to see how the rods can be used. If I were a Silent Way teacher of Spanish, I’d show students a rod and say “palo.? After enough practice to know that students understood and said “palo? as the word for rod, I could show two rods and say “dos" or three rods and say "tres." Thus, students could learn the cardinal numbers. Then by giving phrases like "dos palos" and "tres palos," I could teach the simple "s" plural. If I choose different-length red rods and said "palo rojo," I could teach the word for red and then continue on to teach other colors with different colored rods. It’s also fairly easy to see how the rods could be used to teach some comparatives like "longer/más largo" or "shorter/más corto."

Teaching prepositions of location should also be easy. One could demonstrate how one rod is "above/sobre" or "below/debajo" another rod. Incidentally, the Silent Way teacher can write words, phrases, and sentences on the board for students to study and rewrite, perhaps change and manipulate in the rewriting.

Well, on Friday, August 15, I hope to cover chapters 5 and 6, in which Stevick gives us details of his own experiences using the Silent Way. At that point, we may know more about how this Silent Way handles more complicated aspects of language.