The Silent Way: Word Charts
The 12 wall charts present most of the functional words of the language: about 500 of them.
They are used by the teacher and the students themselves to make oral sentences. Because the charts are permanently on the wall in front of the students, they relieve them of the chore of having to remember words.
They can be used in many different ways. Here are just a few:
- The teacher can introduce a new word by pointing to it. The students know to pronounce it because it is color coded.
- The teacher can point to words to create to a whole sentence. When she has finished the sentence, the students say it.
- A student can come to the front of the class and point to the words of a sentence they're having difficulty with. This enables the teacher to see exactly where the student's problems are.
- Two students can come to the front. One student points a sentence, the other says it.
- Two students can come to the front. One says a sentence the other points it
This is the first in the set of American English charts:
There is very little "luxury vocabulary". This means pronouns, articles, prepositions, common adjectives and adverbs, conjunctions, auxiliary verbs and a few other common verbs have their place, but only a very limited number of nouns.
The order of the words is roughly that used in a beginners' class learning English with the Silent Way.
The color code is the same as that of the Sound/Color Rectangle Chart and the Fidel (spelling charts). The use of color enables students to read directly in languages with a different alphabet or characters and to pronounce correctly what they read.