You’re finally back! This entry will be focused on The Silent Way.

To this day this is the method that called my attention the most, I find this very entertaining, and it might be because it involves colors, the interpretation phase or I do not know. 

If you are not teacher Orlando you might be wondering what is The Silent Way? Well, from my point of view it is an unconventional teaching method, and it was founded in 1970 by Caleb Gattegno. This method is more focused on the students learning than the teacher doing his job, teaching; that is one of the reasons of “silent” in the name of the method.

This is a student centered method and there are different techniques that can be used in this method, for example, The Sound Color Chart, The Teacher’s Silent, Word Chart and The Rods, I am going to talk about the las one, The Rods. By using the colored rods in this way, giving meaning to each one of them, the students can connect language with meaning and they can see how some grammar structures are used. In our session we had to create a small story using colored rods, we had to give a meaning (word, verb, adverb, among others) to the rods, and create a figure with them. This is the one that we made:

In the next session we had to create another story using the rods but this time was more complex because we had to use the IPA Symbols and organize the rods in a better way. Here is the picture of our final figure:

IPA Symbols:

I wish that I remember the story that we made up but I cannot remember it.

Now I am going to explain to you some of the strengths, weakness, opportunities and threats of this method.

The main strength of this method is the development of the brain of the students since they start to understand the coherence of the target language, its use, structures, among others. One weakness is that some students might get confused while using some of the objects that I mentioned before, the colored rods for example. One opportunity that we (teachers) have is paying attention to the students and being available for them, since they are doing the activities and most of the time we are in quiet, just watching. One threat of this method is that students might get bored or stressed during the session since they are the ones doing most of the work.

This was my short summary about our sessions and what we when through when we discussed The Silent Way. if I am missing something, please let me know, I’ll be waiting for your feedback.

See you in my next entry!