The Silent Way materials and what's behind them
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概要
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Many language teachers are familiar to some degree with the teaching materials created for, or popularized by, the Silent Way teaching approach. Perhaps most familiar are the rods. Originally called "Cuisenaire rods," now also marketed as "Algebricks," they are plastic rods of various lengths and colors, the longest being the orange ones at 1x1x10 centimeters, followed by 9-centimeter-long blue rods, then in descending order of length, browns, blacks, dark greens, yellows, purples, light greens, and finally reds at 1x1x2 centimeters. There are also 1-centimeter, white cubes. In addition to the rods, there are several 42x57-centimeter, cardboard wall charts. One of these is the sound-color chart, on which are printed a number of rectangles of different colors, each color representing a phoneme of the language being studied. There are also the "fidel" charts, which constitute an expanded version of the sound-color chart. On these charts are printed all the possible spellings for each phoneme in the color of that phoneme. Finally, there are the word charts, on which are printed a functional vocabulary of the language. These words are printed in colors corresponding to the other charts, indicating the pronunciation of each word. Another tool in the Silent Way arsenal is the metal, collapsible pointer used to point at these charts. While the materials of the Silent Way may be familiar to many language teachers, the tenets and techniques of approach itself do not seem to be as well known. Consequently, the use of Silent Way materials is often incorrectly assumed to be equivalent to the practice of the Silent Way approach. In the absence of a more thorough understanding of the Silent Way, and given the unique, rather unusual nature of the materials themselves, this is not surprising. This paper is written to provide the reader with some insight into the techniques and principles of the Silent Way approach. We will begin with a look at two separate, unrelated language classes. The students in each class are the same-10 so-called "false beginners." The first language for all the students is Japanese.