In 1979, a 40-hour Silent Way Spanish course was held at UCLA for the
benefit of staff members, students and visiting professors who were
invited to join the class or to stop by to observe The Silent Way in
action. Most of the participants in this course were complete beginners.
Susy Pint taught the class while John Pint videotaped it. The forty
hours of tape were then edited, without benefit of proper editing
equipment (sorry about that!) to produce a half-hour overview of the
students’ progress. It was decided to focus on one individual, a
visitor from Japan, who knew no Spanish whatsoever, not even the common
expressions picked up by most westerners from television or movies. The
video, therefore, offers a unique opportunity to follow a student’s
progress from zero right up to a respectable command of the
pronunciation, grammar and basic vocabulary of a new language.
Note the teacher's use of self-correction techniques which soon get
students into the habit of monitoring their own speech.
During the 15th hour of the course. The students are sorting out the
expression:
Las regletas están tocándose.(The
rods are touching each other)
The teacher gives the students a chance to figure out the meaning of tocándose on their own. When a
pronunciation/accent problem arises, she uses gestures and humming to
help them get it right. Then the students bring in a previously studied
word: casi (almost) and try
it out together with the new expression. This is an example of the
subordination of teaching to learning: the students experiment with new
aspects of the language while the teacher stays in the background,
assisting when needed.
This video shows how group cooperation can produce outstanding results,
as opposed to the more traditional classroom approach of cut-throat
competition, in which one student gets the right answer and all the
others are losers.
It was Caleb Gattegno’s hope that the Silent Way would be used in high
schools so that students could master a new language every year.
Following the typical high-school program of one hour per day, the
course presented in this video would represent only two months of
classes and demonstrates that it is possible for students to reach a
high level of mastery—without homework, books or tears—in one academic
year.
Sad to say, instead of producing people who are quadrilingual, US high
schools too often produce people who feel frustrated and unwilling to
ever study a foreign language again.
It could be very different...
Higher resolution versions of this video are available for projection
for a small fee. Contact us here: RanchoPint (at) Hotmail.com.