Supplementary Materials

The silent way

Presentation of Caleb Gattegno's Silent Way

The Silent Way is the pedagogical approach created by Gattegno for teaching foreign languages; the objective is for students to work as autonomous language learners.

An approach that respects the learner

The very name Silent Way highlights the fact that the teacher speaks very little during the lesson; the teacher's role is not to transmit knowledge, to act as a model nor to provide answers. However, the teacher intervenes, if necessary, to draw the learners' attention to the way they are going about the act of learning.

Relying on the students' mental capacities, their experience and acquired skills, the teacher endeavors to ensure that they make their own discoveries, gain their own insights into the functioning of the language, establish their own criteria for rightness, acquire a know-how and above all, become autonomous as learners and speakers of the language.

Because Silent Way teachers speak so little, they are free to observe their students carefully and be available to them.

The teacher remains the indispensable guarantor of the correctness of the language (the sounds, prosody, vocabulary, syntax, register...) and of its appropriateness to the situation.

Supplementary Materials

Worksheets

Supplementary Materials means everything we use in addition to the course book.

We have different kinds or types of supplementary materials: -          worksheets

-          flash cards

-          realia

-          movie

-          audio

-          extensive readers

-          external materials

-          games

-          pictures

-          PowerPoint (computers)

-          Posters -       Newspaper and magazine

-          Work cards

Reasons for using supplementary materials:

If we have a good course book, why do we need these supplementary materials?

-          to make the lesson more interesting

-          variety

-          helpful for heterogeneous classes

-          sometimes teachers find the book is no suitable for the class’s level

-          sometimes the book doesn’t include so many topics that may interest the students

Worksheets

When we prepare worksheet, we have to use a check list for making a good worksheet.

The Check List: -     meaningful title

-          note order of activities

-          example

-          instruction

-          relating to heterogeneity

-          format

-          graded levels of difficulty

-          note content

-          not too dense

-          place for pupil’s name

-          thoughtful use of font size, type, bold, underlyining