English Didactics l: The Silent Way🙊🙊

🙊🙊 The Silent Way🙊🙊

Hello me here again with a new blog for the week...✌💙

We learned about "The Silent Way👄🙊" method, where we learned about Cuisenaire Rods, and how to make sentences or stories using this Cuisenaire Rods method.

Our first task after exploring the rods was to create a stories. It was interesting to watch classmates create their stories and see which classmate's group had to individually count/point the squares on each rod and which classmates could mental ‘hold’ the number as they counted.

The Silent Way, was founded in the early 1970s by the Egyptian mathematician and educator Caleb Gattegno. It is based on the idea that language learning can be enhanced in three main ways: discovery rather than teaching; problem-solving in the target language; the use of physical tools.

The Silent Way is a language-teaching approach created by Caleb Gattegno that makes extensive use of silence as a teaching method. Gattegno introduced the method in 1963, in his book Teaching Foreign Languages in Schools: The Silent Way. The method emphasizes learner autonomy and active student participation. Silence is used as a tool to achieve this goal; the teacher uses a mixture of silence and gestures to focus students' attention, to elicit responses from them, and to encourage them to correct their own errors. Pronunciation is seen as fundamental to the method, with a great deal of time spent on it each lesson. The Silent Way uses a structural syllabus and concentrates on teaching a small number of functional and versatile words. Translation and rote repetition are avoided, and the language is usually practiced in meaningful contexts. Evaluation is carried out by observation, and the teacher may never set a formal test.