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Explaining Concepts Behind The Silent
Way - Patricia Benstein
The following short passages are selected from a longer paper which the author presented in
Australia describing her dissertation research on “An Overview of the Silent Way - theoretical
concepts and their implementation”. At several points in the following she draws on an
interview with Roslyn Young (conducted during November, 1994) as well as reading in
Roslyn’s forthcoming book, On Learning and observation of Silent Way classes at the
Center for Applied Linguistics in Besançon.
What The Silent Way is
The Silent Way is commonly defined as a teaching method for foreign languages in which the
teachers are mostly silent and use rods and charts as their main teaching tools. Although
Silent Way teachers do use rods and charts most of the time there can be Silent Way teaching
without these tools while at the same time there may be teachers who use the suggested tools
but do not really follow the Silent Way.
The confusion occurs when the Silent Way is understood as a teaching method rather than an
approach to teaching.
Method refers to “an overall plan for the orderly presentation of language material, no part of
which contradicts, and all of which is based upon, the selected approach. An approach is
axiomatic, a method is procedural.” (E. Anthony, “Approach, method and technique,” English
Language Teaching, 17:2, 1963)
Approach refers to “a set of correlative assumptions dealing with the nature of language and
the nature of language teaching and learning. An approach is axiomatic... It states a point of
view, a philosophy....” (Anthony)
Gattegno used the same approach to teaching for mathematics, reading and writing,
languages, and other school subjects. I would consider the common characteristic of all these
approaches to be what Gattegno called “The Subordination of Teaching to Learning.” The
Silent Way is the name that is given to the subordination of teaching to learning when it is
applied to foreign languages. Subordination of teaching to learning means making the
learners’ needs the focus of one’s teaching. Gattegno used to say, “I teach people and they
learn the language.” This means that the teacher and the student focus on different things
during the lesson. It is the students’ job to direct their learning; it is the teacher’s job to work
on the students by presenting language in such ways that force awareness and presence to the
moment.
In the Silent Way classroom, the subordination of teaching to learning can be implemented
according to the following sequence of steps:

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▪ Student experiments with the language. S/he produces a sentence, grammatical
construction, sound combination.
▪ Teacher gives feedback on the experiment by indicating the presence of a mistake or
inadequacy. This feedback represents the teacher’s own experiment or trial. Note that
the feedback never involves the correction of the mistake, but only an indication of
where the mistake is.
▪ Student produces an additional experiment, trying to correct herself or himself, which
provides feedback to the teacher.
▪ Teacher deduces from the produced sentence whether his/her trial was appropriate/helpful.
▪ The cycle continues until the student’s utterance is adequate, correct and true.
The Self
The self, according to Gattegno, is the free creative energy which is at the core of one’s being.
The self is not an organ and has no anatomical location: it is an energy.
It is the self which meets the unknown in order to become familiar with it.
The self must be distinguished from the psyche, which is locked up energy consisting of
previous learnings that have become automatisms.
If a student meets for the first time the present perfect continuous form, “I have been living,”
which does not exist in French or German, he or she is wise to use the self, which means to be
completely open to a new awareness, rather than trying to search the psyche for what cannot
be found there. If, however, one wants to type, the psyche will provide the automatisms which
support this activity.
The Silent Way teacher has to make sure that students use their selves to face new learning
situations and use their psyches when previous, automatized, learnings will save energy.
Silent way teachers also need to bear in mind the various attributes of the self, which include:
will, adaptation, sense of truth, objectivation, patience, discrimination, imagination, sense of
harmony, concentration, vulnerability, passion, freedom, awareness, intelligence, sensitivity,
action, perception, abstraction.
Learning takes place when many attributes of the self are simultaneously engaged. Language
learners need to be vulnerable, ready to look at the world in a fresh way via the new language.
They need to employ their will to make their learning successful. They need to be curious and
feel the need to know something new all the time. They need to be sensitive to achieve an
ever finer tuning in the language.
Silent Way teachers use this model of the self to encourage students to “put the self at the
helm” and to address specific attributes of the self which may be blocked in a learner. Thus a
teacher may encourage a student to move into action by handing the pointer and asking him or
her to do something when that person has been only engaged in the attributes of abstraction or
imagination. Or, if a student is always moving into action without using intelligence, the
teacher may address another attribute, such as the sense of truth, to slow the student down.
The aim is always to achieve harmony and balance between the attributes, appealing to all of
them so that the student can keep the self at the helm.
An understanding of the self and the psyche helps us to grasp the internal processes going on
in any learner during any learnng, which are called:
“The Four Stages of Learning”

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Stage 1: Initial encounter with the unknown Students need to have self at the helm to learn
new skills. Several trials may be necessary to achieve positive results.
Stage 2: Practice of skills Skills become developed enough to be applied to various
situations Students can direct their own practice. Skills are integrated for storage into the
psyche.
Stage 3: Mastery of skills Skills are well integrated into the psyche. Students challenge
themselves by expanding on their skills.
Stage 4: Application of skills Skills have become completely automatic - no mental energy
is required to use them. Skills are subordinated to meet further challenges.
Awareness
Awareness plays such a fundamental function in Gattegno’s model that it has been called
“The Awareness Model” (C. De Cordoba, “A Proposal Based on the Silent Way and its
Underlying Theory for the Improvement of Current Teaching Programs...,” Unpublished
Doctoral Dissertation, International College, Los Angeles, 1986). Gattegno uses the word
awareness in many different contexts to describe different phenomena. Awareness is for him
the result of self-observation which he requires of Silent Way teachers; awareness describes a
state of being which leads to “reflection in action” for Silent Way teachers; it describes a
wakefulness which includes knowledge and alertness.
In order to get a more precise definition I had to go back to the French terms of “conscience”
and “prise de conscience.” The French word “conscience, ” which translates roughly as
awareness/consciousness/knowing, can be defined as the knowledge which human beings
have of their state of being, their acts and their moral value. “Conscience” allows human
beings to feel themselves existing, to be present to themselves. The French term seems to be
used in a broader sense than the English term awareness, and I think this is what Gattegno
meant when he said that Silent Way teachers have to be aware as people before they can be of
use to their students.
The other aspect of awareness is again only understood if one refers to the French expression
“prise de conscience.” Gattegno speaks of the task of the teacher to “provoke awarenesses,”
thereby indicating - by his use of the plural - that he does not mean awareness as a state of
being but of multiple realizations, recognitions, understandings. “Prise” comes from
“prendre,” which means to take. Gattegno thus uses the term to describe the jelling of an
awareness which, as Roslyn Young has explained, “takes” or solidifies at a certain moment so
that it becomes tangible and more easily observable. It is these jellings of awareness (“prises
de conscience”) which Silent Way teachers try to provoke in their teaching.
Awarenesses can be big or small. If a student has a burning question which she holds with a
high degree of tension, the awareness, when it comes, will be bigger than if the question was
at the back of her mind and self for a shorter time.
It is the task of the Silent Way teacher to provoke awarenesses because they constitute
learning. Silent Way teachers try not to transmit knowledge but know-how; they may ask
more questions than give answers; they encourage students to stay with the tension and they
use silence to provide the space within which students can come to an awareness.
© Patricia Benstein
Faculty of Education School of Teaching and Curriculum Studies Sydney, Australia
May, 1995

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The Science of Education in Questions - N° 14 - May 1996
"Explaining Concepts Behind The Silent Way" by Patricia Benstein is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.