The Comparison of Silent Way and Audio Lingual Method

Silent Way

Goal : To enable students to use the target language for express their feeling, mind, and perception.

Teacher’s Role: teacher facilitates learning and provides exercises to insure their facility with the language. Teacher relies on students’ knowledge, what they already know. Only can give what help is necessary to students. The teacher is silent. Teacher's silence gives the responsibility to the student. Besides it helps students improve their own inner criteria.

Interactions in class: In student-teacher interaction, the teacher is silent. He/she attentively listen to students’ speech and give students help by using nonverbal gestures and tools. Sometimes teacher speaks to give clues, not to model the language. In student-student verbal interaction, students can learn from one another and for encourage them.

Areas of language which are emphasized: sound/pronunciation and language structure.

Language skills which are emphasized: all four skills (reading, writing, listening and speaking) are used from the beginning of the learning process. The skills reinforce what students learn.

Culture: Culture is an inseparable part of language. Language reflects culture. Everyday life, art, literature should be learnt.

Evaluation: The teacher may never give a formal test. He/she assesses students' learning all the time.

The role of students’ native language: to give instruction to students only when it is necessary. To know the meaning of a word or sentence in the target language is by focusing the students’
perceptions, not by translating it into the native language.

Teacher’s respond to students’ errors: teacher sees students’ errors as a natural incident in the learning process. By students’ errors, teacher can decide where further work is necessary. Teacher gives students an opportunity to self-correct their errors. If students are unable to self-correct then teacher will give the correct answer.

Techniques and Materials: Teacher’s silence, Self-correction gestures, Rods, Word Chart, Sound-color Chart, Fidel Chart, Structured Feedback.


Audio-Lingual Method

Goal: To enable students to use the target language communicatively and automatically without have to stop to thinking.

Teacher’s role: teacher directs and controls the students’ language behavior. Teacher also provides students a good model for imitation. Teacher is also a good model for pronunciation and other oral skills.

Interactions in class: most of the interaction is between teacher and students. Student-student interaction is when students play different roles in dialogs by teacher’s directed.

Areas of language which are emphasized: sound system and grammatical patterns.

Language skills which are emphasized: all four skills (reading, writing, listening, and speaking). But oral/aural skills receive most of the attention. Everyday speech and oral skills are important. Pronunciation is taught from the beginning. Perfect pronunciation is required. Particularly, language is for oral communication.

Culture: culture consists of everyday behavior and lifestyle of the target language community.

Evaluation: discrete-point tests are used. Each question would focus on only one point of the language at a time. Ex: supplying an appropriate verb form in a sentence.

The role of students’ native language: students’ native language is not used in the classroom because the use of the students’ native language might interfere the students’ attempts to master the target language. All communicative activities in classroom use the target language.

Teacher responds students’ errors: through the teacher’s awareness of where students will have difficulty, students’ errors are attempted to be avoided.

Techniques and Materials: Dialog memorization, Backward build-up drill, Repetition drill, Chain drill, Use of minimal pairs, Transformation drill, Question-and-answer drill, complete the dialog, and Grammar game.