𝐒𝐈𝐋𝐄𝐍𝐓 𝐖𝐀𝐘 𝐌𝐄𝐓𝐇𝐎𝐃

 This methodology of learning/teaching languages is based on the idea that teachers should be as quiet as possible during a class and let students speak more and more. This method was created by Caleb Gattegno. The Silent method puts emphasis on the student's autonomy to learn a language with less teacher intervention, turning the role of the teacher into a "monitor" role. The aforementioned method also puts a great emphasis on correct pronunciation from the very beginning.

HOW DOES IT WORK?

The teacher hands out different rods to the students, these rods have different colors and have different length: small, medium, long, and very long. These figures represent different parts of a sentence. During the whole process the teacher remains silent and the students expectant, then, the teacher gives some indications to the students and they build different sentences with the rods. The objective of this practice is for the students to find out on their own how the language works and to practice their pronunciation of the words.

PROS AND CONS

Pros

- Students are more independent

- It encourages students to be active participants in their own learning

- The use of visual aids makes the learning process easier

- This allows students to learn at their own pace and make mistakes without feeling embarrassed

Cons

- It is difficult to implement if the teacher has no experience using this method

- Some students could have problems when certain topic is confusing for them and they are not allowed to ask the teacher for an explicit explanation 

ACTIVITIES IN THIS CLASS

For this class, the teacher kept quiet. All the instructions were given through written commands. What we did was received colorful objects called Cuisenaire rods (which are used to teach Maths and more teaching-learning processes), every rod has a grammatical meaning depending on its color. For example red rods= verbs; blue rod= subject; yellow rod= complement; white rod= particle. 

Then only the students discuss how to create different sentences by using different visual representations with the rods.

There are some examples that we executed in this weekly lesson!

These rods represent different grammatical parts of a sentence

The teacher handed out the different colored rods 

This figure represents a sentence by only using rods