Diane Larsen-Freeman

5 The Silent Way
INTRODUCTION
Although people did team languages through the Audio-Lingual Method
(and indeed it is still practiced today), one problem wit h it was students'
inability to readily transfer the habi ts they had mastered in the classroom
to communicative use outside it. Furthermore, the idea th at learning a
langua ge meant forming a set of habits was ser iously cha llenged in th e
ea rly 19605. Lingui st Noarn Chomsky argued th ar language acquisition
could not possibly take place through ha bit formation since people cre ate
and und erstand utteran ces they have never hea rd before. Choms ky proposed
instead that spea kers ha ve a knowledge of underl ying a bstract
rule s, wh ich a llow them to understand and create novel urreranccs. Thus,
Chomsky reasoned, la nguage must not he considered a product of ha bit
for mation, but rather ofrule formation. Acco rdingly,language acquisition
mu sr be a pro cedure wh ereby peo ple lise their own th inking processes, or
cognition , to discover th e ru les of the language they arc acquiring .
The emphas is on human cognition led to the establish ment of the
Cognitive App roach (Colee-Murcia 199 1). Ra ther than simply being
responsive to stimuli in th e environment, learners were seen to be much
more actively responsible for thei r own learn ing, engaged in formula ting
hypotheses in o rde r to discover the rules of the target language. Errors
were inevitable and were signs tha t learners were acti vely tes ting their
hypotheses. For a while in the ea rly 197{)s there was great interest in
applying this new Cognitive Approach to language teachin g and materials
were develo ped with deductive {learners ar c given the rule an d asked
to apply it}an d ind uct ive (learners discover the ru les fro m the ex amples
an d then practice it) grammar exe rcises. Ho wever, no language teaching
met hod ever really develo ped directly from the Cognitive Ap proach;
instead, a number of ' innovative method s' emerged. In the next few chapters
we wi ll rake a loo k at these.
Altho ugh Ca leb Gatteguo's Silent Way did not stem directly fro m the
Cognitive Approach, it shares certain prin cip les wit h it. For example,
o ne of the basic pr inciples of the Silent Way is tha t 'Teaching sho uld be