Teaching Foreign

Languages the Silent

Way
In Caleb Gattegno's Silent Way, discovery and
awareness lead students to mastery of foreign
language grammar, pronunciation and
vocabulary.
by John Pint

In 1963, an unpretentious
booklet was published with the
title Teaching Foreign
Languages in Schools: The
Silent Way by mathematician
Caleb Gattegno (1911-1988),
famed for having put the
Cuisenaire rods into classrooms
throughout the world.
Gattegno’s specialty was education through discovery
and awareness. In the case of foreign language
learning, he reasoned that most students walk into their
classrooms with all the mental equipment needed to
pick up new languages, simply because they had
already learned their native tongue at a tender age –
without the help of teachers and books.
Grammar the Silent Way
In the early 1960s, Gattegno and his associates were
experimenting with ways to spark awareness through
linguistic situations created with colored rods. For
example, one student might tell another to take a rod
and put it under, inside or behind a box. As the student
attempts to give these instructions, the teacher’s job is
to provide feedback on his or her pronunciation and
grammar, and also to supply expressions the student
doesn’t know or can’t guess.

In these game-like situations, the words spoken are not

related to textbook exercises or translations, but to
situations which are tactilely and visually verifiable.

It is quite easy to teach “difficult” grammar using the

rods and to help students achieve remarkable precision
in the use of important function words like did, it,
of and than.

Examples of Grammar Taught with

Cuisenaire rods
 How many red rods did Carlos take out of the box?
 Give her a rod which is shorter than a blue one but
longer than a light green one.
 If I were to put a blue rod on top of the orange ones,
would all of them fall?

Silent Way Word Charts

Charts with letters colored coded for pronunciation
contain hundreds of function words which can be
mastered using colored rods. These charts could be
considered the closest thing to a curriculum guide for
the Silent Way. Familiarity with these function words
helps students build a strong base in grammar or
pronunciation in a very short time, after which they can
turn their attention to acquiring vocabulary.

Building Vocabulary the Silent Way

Gattegno devised ways to teach vocabulary that allow
students to take in and retain a surprisingly large
number of words in the space of an hour or two. These
words are linked to a common theme which may be
portrayed in a picture. Open-ended “restriction” word
games allow the students to use the new vocabulary in
imaginative ways.

Pronunciation and Spelling the

Silent Way
While working for UNESCO in Ethiopia, Gattegno
devised a new way of listing all the sounds of a
language – as well as the various ways these can be
spelled – in color-coded columns. In the hands of an
expert, these Silent Way charts assist students in
quickly achieving good pronunciation and provide them
with a logical way to master spelling.

Silence and the Silent Way

Gattegno held that his approach was a common-sense
way of teaching foreign languages in a classroom
situation. The approach was tagged “The Silent Way”
to disagree with theories that language learning takes
place through repetition.

Gattegno proved that he could successfully teach

numerous languages without modeling, in fact without
speaking at all. However, Gattegno insisted that neither
silence nor rods were essential to his approach, but
rather a principle which he called “the subordination of
teaching to learning.” This common-sense principle is,
in fact, the very backbone of Caleb Gattegno’s "Silent
Way".