Methodology 15

SILENT WAY
1. Teaching should be subordinate to learning.
2. Language is not learned by repeating after a model; students need to develop their own “inner criteria” for correctness.
3. Errors are important and necessary to learning.
4. It is the students who should be practicing the language, not the teacher. Caleb Gattegno was another methodologist who believed that language learning could occur at a much faster rate than normally transpires. What often happens, however, is that teaching interferes with learning. To prevent this from occurring, the central principle of Gattegno’s Silent Way is that “teaching should be subordinated to learning.” This means, in part, that the teacher bases his lesson on what the students are learning in the moment, not what he wants to teach them.

COMMUNICATIVE APPROACH
1. The primary goal of language teaching is enabling students to use the language to communicate. Communication involves using language functions as well as grammar structures.
2. Language is used in a social context and should be appropriate to setting, topic, and participants.
3. Students should be given an opportunity to negotiate meaning, i.e., to make themselves understood.
4. Students should be able to express their opinions and share their idea and feelings; i.e., learn to communicate by communicating. You may have noticed that originators of the methods demonstrated on these videotapes take as their primary goal, student communicating in the target language. Many of these same methodologists emphasize the acquisition of linguistic structures or vocabulary. In the last method we will observe, the Communicative Approach, it is acknowledged that structures and vocabulary are important. However, adherents of the Communicative Approach feel that students must master the functions or purposes to which it is put before they will be able to truly use the language. Watch how this view of language influences the way the teacher designs the lesson.