What is linguo-cultural teaching and learning? Linguo-cultural teaching and learning

Increased engagement. Learning basic vocabulary and pronunciation can often feel monotonous to students. With the Silent Way, students are engaged in the learning process, discovering words and sounds instead of having these drilled into them. Students become more engaged and invested in the process as they assume more responsibility for their own learning, and tasks have more relevance.

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  A positive, safe learning environment. Limited input from the teacher means almost no criticism… which means students feel that it is safe to make mistakes, a necessary step in language learning.
  

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  It can supplement further student-centered work. Including the above features in your students’ learning will complement deeper interactive and independent work with the language.
  

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    The background of Silent Way.
    

This unconventional method was developed alongside Afro hairstyles and platform shoes back in the 1970s by mathematician (yes, we said mathematician) Caleb Gattegno. It was based upon ideas outlined in his book “Teaching Foreign Languages in Schools the Silent Way,” published in 1963. Like most cultural events of the 60s and 70s, it was a reaction to previous approaches and methods that were considered excessively rigid and constricting. The Chomskyan criticism of the theories upon which the audiolingual method was founded led to an interest in not only the affective factors but also in the cognitive factors. While Community Language Learning, drawing from Carl Roger’s philosophy, focused on the importance of the affect, new methods were developed in the 70s to highlight the cognitive domain in language learning. The Silent Way is one of these innovative methods.
In Fact, Caleb Gattegno, the founder of the Silent Way,devoted his thinking to the importance of problem solving approach in education. He contends that the method is constructivist and leads the learners to develop their own conceptual models of all the aspects of the language. The best way of achieving this is to help students to be experimental learners.
The basic method that underlies this approach is simple but potentially quite powerful: In contrast to traditional methods, the emphasis is on the student’s learning rather than the teacher’s teaching. In fact, it is not uncommon for the teacher to remain silent for parts of a lesson.
In the absence of the teacher dominating the lesson, the student takes an active role in the learning process, and their input guides the learning trajectory. The teacher redirects and corrects when necessary, but the teacher grants students greater autonomy and fosters the development of independent problem-solving skills.The role of the teacher is to direct students’ focus, facilitate self-reflection and provide verbal and nonverbal feedback when necessary. Students, on the other hand, are encouraged to speak as much as possible.Most of the traditional tools for language instruction (textbooks, worksheets, verb conjugation tables) are completely absent from this method. In their place, instruction takes place through the medium of Cuisenaire rods (colored rods traditionally used in the teaching of math to primary school students) and charts that indicate the correct pronunciation of certain letters without the teacher having to teach pronunciation through rote memorization or call-and-response exercises.

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