03 May 2022

Explore other languages through these interactive board games

Announcing The Silent Way series

The Silent Way is an approach to teaching languages that is based on explicit ideas about how people learn, the nature of language and how foreign languages are best taught.

Applied in the classroom, they lead to the teacher being largely silent, a striking aspect of the approach which gave it its name.

Sometimes learning a language seems like an endless task. We can be intimidated by the thickness of the dictionary or grammar book. No one knows all the words of their native language, but we can generate much language with very little vocabulary. If we know how to use the 400 or so function words for a language, as presented on Silent Way charts, then we have learnt nearly all of the grammar of that language.

Working this way almost eliminates the memory burden of getting started with a language: learning a language is mostly about familiarity and has very little to do with memorisation. We show the whole at the same time as the parts because it gives context — all the sounds of the language on one sound-colour chart, all the spellings of those sounds, in the same colours, on a spelling chart, all the grammar on word charts. So students can start to become familiar with the language by exploring what they can see and point to in the virtual game environment.