How do you use SW for students not interested in learning?

[Cedric Lefebvre]

Last month, one of my friend came to ask me some advice. He's now teaching English to teenager in France, and has some ideas about how the Silent Way works. In one of his first attempts, he tried to do a "Mister Green" activity with two different classes, and met a rather average success. He sent me audio messages on Whatsapp (and in French), so I can't easily transcribe what he asked me here, but I'll try to sum it up.

So, he decided to start with a ficticious Mister Green going about his morning routine in an apartment, because he thought it would be engaging for the students and would help them say a few things and learn from it. As far as I can tell, each group had about 20 students, and he asked each of them to create a sentence in order to form a sequence of actions (Mister Green woke up at 7. Then he made breakfast. Then... etc.). He was happy that some students did engage with the activity, but noticed that basically those who spoke were the ones that needed less help with their English, and many other students just looked bored and passive. He then told me: I can tell that SW is a very good approach, but how can you use it to teach English in this kind of context?

At the time, I tried a first answer that I'm going to copy here, but truth is that I don't have real experience with such classrooms, and I feel that it's an important topic for many teachers, which means a perfect topic for our good ol' Subtle!

Here's what I wrote back (on whatsapp, so it's what it is...).

[08:37, 6/9/2023] Cedric: 1/ I think the theme of your question is: how to teach something to a group that doesn't necessarily want to learn that thing?
[08:39, 6/9/2023] Cedric: 2/ In this category, there are subgroups such as: teaching people who are not used to being active during classes; teaching a group with very different levels of involvement and interest; teaching people who are afraid of being judged by other students; etc.
[08:41, 6/9/2023] Cedric: 3/ I think Don Cherry is the Silent Way teacher I know who has the most experience with this because he primarily works with university students who are not always highly motivated by English; Luisa Piemontese as well. You could maybe ask them certain questions on Subtle to get their opinions;
[08:43, 6/9/2023] Cedric: 4/ I don't know if you regularly have these classes or if it was one of the first times, but the type of engagement you find in a SW class is different from most other classes, so I think there is a time needed for students to get used to it or not, and at the beginning, they will react based on their old habits mainly;
[08:46, 6/9/2023] Cedric: 5/ For me, thinking about the course from the perspective of "it has to grab the group" is almost never a concern, except perhaps in the very first lesson (my students pay a fair amount to be present, and they want to get something out of it); on the other hand, Don often says that his biggest challenge is capturing the interest of the class, and what they will do next is secondary: once he has the interest of enough students, he knows that they will learn some English that day anyway.
[08:47, 6/9/2023] Cedric: 6/ What was your goal when you chose this activity? What worked and what didn't?
[08:54, 6/9/2023] Cedric: 7/ For me, Mr. Brown presents the following advantages:
- What happens is relatively explicit, so everyone understands the meaning of each sentence without translation or explanation;
- It is also relatively simple and sequential, so the group can generally create mental images of the situations, connect them to the English phrases, and benefit from a little bit of expressive autonomy;
- The necessary vocabulary is quite limited, and these everyday words can be reused in other contexts;
- It can easily be related to each student's individual reality, and the story can also be shifted in time (past, present, future, anteriority, etc.);
- etc.
8/... But there are also the following disadvantages:
- As the sentences become more complex, we don't always know what is happening (unless there is a video with someone performing all the actions we are talking about, for example);
- If there are multiple "authors" of the story, it can go in somewhat nonsensical directions ("he makes some coffee," "then he goes to the gym"... Wait, what about his coffee?);
- If learning the language is not a sufficient motivation, many students may get bored if they have to talk about imaginary and uninteresting characters; it's the famous phrase: talk to me about myself, that's the only thing that interests me.
9/ I don't believe that Silent Way has particularly interesting answers to question 1/. In fact, in the logic of Gattegno's learning model, if someone doesn't want to learn something, it's a better idea to ensure that they do something more useful with their time rather than insist. Obviously, this is not very compatible with our educational institutions, so finding ways to make students want to learn the language is somewhat of a prerequisite... However, if someone genuinely wants to learn to speak English, I am convinced that once they get used to the differences in teaching style, they will be captivated by the content whenever it is adapted to their needs and abilities (subordination). So SW does a better job than the rest when people want to learn (because many people want to learn but are demotivated by ineffective classes), but in my opinion, not so much if people are there out of obligation.


 (type a)

(type b)

[09:14, 6/9/2023] Cedric: I have the impression that what you are describing corresponds too much to type a... with T being the teacher and the red dots being the students.
[09:15, 6/9/2023] Cedric: Try to make your class more like type b.
[09:19, 6/9/2023] Cedric: With type b:
- Your students choose whom they address for the next sentence.
- If there is no specific order, it means that everyone can be called upon to speak at any moment, so it's better to follow what is happening.
- You have more space to observe, and you intervene less, mainly for feedback.
- etc.
[09:22, 6/9/2023] Cedric: In general, ask yourself why your students would want to listen to what others say and what could make them want to do it more. Here's an example...
[09:26, 6/9/2023] Cedric: T: François, tell me one thing that you do almost every day in the morning.
F: I do some guided meditation.
T: Now, ask Bernadette the same thing, and she'll ask someone else...
F: Bernadette, tell me one thing that you do almost every day in the morning.
B: I watch German comedy. And you, Émilien?
E: I feed my cat. And you, Geraldine?
... etc.
[09:28, 6/9/2023] Cedric: When the whole group or part of it has spoken, we change it a bit:
Teacher: Gontrand, tell me what François does every day in the morning.
G: He does some guided meditation.
T: Now ask someone who hasn't spoken yet about someone else.
G: Juliarde, tell me what Bernadette does in the morning...
Etc.
[09:30, 6/9/2023] Cedric: This is a quick example, but by doing this, you show them that if they don't listen to others' responses, they won't be able to repeat them later. Also, each response can be somewhat surprising and therefore interesting.
[09:32, 6/9/2023] Cedric: In my opinion, you will always be in competition with the gossip from the day before: if at time T what happens in your class is less captivating than what Bernadette wants to tell Juliarde, these two students will prefer to chat with each other in French rather than listen to what's going on in class... It's up to you to answer the question: why would Bernadette listen to the class instead of telling her story to Juliarde?

I would also like to add that I believe convincing students that they should learn the language because it will be useful for their future work or travel is not a good strategy. It may work with some people, of course, but it's too long-term for most people, especially for teenagers and children. It has to appeal to them because it addresses what interests them here and now, and that's where the challenge lies.

[don cherry]

I agree with you, Cedric, that lecturing students on the benefits of learning English is probably not the best strategy to motivate them, and I believe it wastes energy that would be better spent trying to figure out how to engage students by tapping into their natural curiosity and love of challenging play. If you do that, it’s almost beside the point what they are learning, even if it is a subject they say they don’t like (though, as Nico pointed out at our meeting last month, English is often just a subject they’ve got lots of bad school experiences with rather than one they actually dislike). 

 

I think your friend's idea of having students generate the building blocks of a morning routine is a reasonable approach to this sort of activity, but it sounds like it didn't work. Might work better with another group, but it didn't with these two groups. Acknowledging that fact and figuring out another approach will make him a better teacher and will benefit all the students he meets in the future. I am going on about this at what seem like unnecessary length to make two points, and those are, one, the students we have are the students we have, and two, the only thing we can directly control in the classroom is what WE do and not what the students do. These are not particularly groundbreaking insights (I have precious few of those) but I mention it here because I have met more than a few teachers who spend way too much time complaining about how passive/stupid/uncooperative their students are. All their students are like this, some of these teachers seem to complain, ignoring the common denominator in all their classrooms, which of course is the teacher. The more productive thing to do is what your friend is doing, trying to figure out a way to reach his students. Okay, rant over.

 

One suggestion I have is for your friend to focus students’ attention more on the connective tissue of the language in this activity rather than the vocabulary-heavy building blocks. He might, for instance begin with a limited number of pictures. Maybe just 3 to 5. Simple pictures. Maybe just icon type things. Say, a razor, a cup of coffee/tea, a shower, etc. By tapping the pictures, or providing any other minimal cues, the students could generate the language for each picture. Or the teacher can just provide that before moving on to the meat of the lesson, the connective tissue, which as described in the lesson described was fairly limited to just "then." This could be expanded to include: after, before, after/before that, then after he did that, 10 minutes after/before that, half an hour after he took a shower he left his apartment, how long after he ate did he leave for work?, what did he do before he ___, what time did he finish ____, how long did it take him to ____, etc. The guiding principle regarding which specific connective tissue to focus on would be what the students need. My students are all Japanese, and I know they'll often misuse "after" to wind up with sentences like "Toshiyuki proposed to Midori Wednesday, after they got married". Obviously, "after that" would be required. And if you throw in "three days after that" you have 20 minutes of gloriously challenging fun.

 

The limited number of pictures could later be expanded by students brainstorming more morning activities. The benefit of focusing on the connective tissue is that the students are constantly working on the building blocks almost without even realizing it because their attention is fully on how those building blocks go together. It's the same sort of thing that SW teachers do by focusing students' attention on pronunciation. Not just sounds, but melody, rhythm, etc. Especially rhythm. It's what makes pat-a-cake and jump rope so much fun. Take the jump rope or pat-a-cake away and it's just a listless non-English-sounding sentence that some teachers might excuse by saying something like, "Yeah, but with a little bit of work by the listener it gets the basics of the message across in a way that could, from certain angles, be seen as being nearly communicative." Yay?

 

Another suggestion is, where possible and when appropriate, maybe engage students in non-vocal physical work. I often do this at the very start of a lesson with especially challenging groups. I do it to get students leaning forward a bit. Once you get them leaning forward, moving toward the front edge of their seats trying to figure out what this weird man is doing and why some people seem to be understanding it, and how they're going to get out of this phone booth (Roslyn's phone booth thing—I think about that all the time), once you get them doing that, you've got 'em! Sorry, that "you've got 'em!" doesn't sound very teacher-like, but you know what I mean. One example of this is in the very first SW lesson at my uni, I will walk to the front of the students and clap the beat 'clap CLAP' just once and indicate that I want them to do the same. They will have no idea what the hell's going on and will start to inch forward a bit. I'll feign exasperation and make it clear I'm only going to do it one more time, which I do. And then I go around the room until I find one student who got it and draw students’ attention to that. I'll keep going around the room. If a student doesn't have it yet, I'll just move on. It's up to the student to pay attention to who's got it. (and if some student doesn't get it . . . so what? It's just a game). After enough students get it, I'll ask them which model it is, and draw their attention to two models I've set up, each consisting of two cubes, one with a red rod atop the cube on the left and the other with a red rod atop the cube on the right. They, after some reflection, will point to the model with the cube on the right. I'll clap one of the two patterns a few times more, having students point each time to the pattern I've clapped. I'll have pairs then work together, taking turns with one person clapping and the other pointing at what was clapped. I'll keep moving pairs around, each time I do so, expanding the models at the front to three syllables, then four, until I have at last five models, each consisting of five cubes, each with a red rod atop a different syllable. I then point at a word I've written on the board and ask them to clap it. After some initial consternation, they figure out the task. I check it with cubes and a red rod. By now, they're so invested in the word, it would be an appalling act of naked aggression not to go ahead and say the damn thing when I point at it. They're very nearly bursting to say it by then. And having the cubes upfront like that, we can work syllable by syllable on the pronunciation. And I can move the red rod around to have them practice putting stress on each syllable to see how that feels to them before settling on the correct syllable to be stressed. You can see this as an exercise in word stress, but I don't see it like that at all. I see it as an exercise in working on students' awareness and … something else I can't quite put my finger on. Anyway, it's also fun.

 

Another non-vocal activity is when I have students arrange words I've passed out to pairs to come up with "Wednesday of the week before last." I then pass out a grid of squares consisting of 5 rows and 7 columns, with one square somewhere in the middle shaded in. I then gesture for them to point at "Wednesday of the week before last." After a bit of a struggle, possibly with me feigning exasperation and pointing at the shaded square and tapping "today," they figure out the task, though they'll usually point to the square representing "Wednesday of last week." Doesn't matter. That can be addressed later. They are leaning in now.

 

One final and simple example: I silently put my hand behind my head, next to my head, in front of my face, extended out before my face, and extended out to one side. I then ask students to do the same. They’ve had me long enough now that a couple students will have paid close attention and will have the gestures right, and the other students will watch them and work on their gestures. It sounds ridiculous, but it really works. After we’ve all had some fun doing these gestures in the order I did them in. I point to phrases like “across from” or “next to” or “down the street from” and you almost can’t stop them from doing the gesture for each.

 

I could go on, but this is already too long, and I have to go to buy some eyeglasses because at my school last health check the eye test examiner was surprised I was able find the building the health check was being held in. See you guys later.

 

-Don

[don cherry]

Sorry about the double-posting. Please ignore the first attempt at the reply to Cedric. The second one (above) has been corrected for the stupid mistakes 'auto-correct' injected into my otherwise inspired prose. 

[Caren Lumley]

Hi Cedric, hi Don, hi everyone,

I've just finisher reading the messages in this thread and really enjoyed doing so. Both made me smile and chuckle to myself because I could clearly imagine the situations described and see myself in the classroom, too. I have a lot of different ideas but not a lot of time today, so just a few quick comments for now:

-Cedric, I totally agree with going from 'type A' to 'type B' teaching. The only thing is, if your friend teaches at a secondary school in France and he's only just starting to use different techniques after having taught in a more traditional way all year, it might be destabilizing for his students, who won't want to engage if the activity is just a one-off thing. I remember a few years ago when I was transitioning from my old teaching approach to SW: I did it right in the middle of a course, and my students didn't get what I was trying to do. I find that if I don't go all in from the start, it's more difficult to get them to see where I'm trying to take them.

-I agree with Don's idea of the objects/pictures. There's a good chance these students are being given more freedom to say things than they ever have been, and they don't know what to do with it. I regularly teach one-week intensives to French teenagers -- poor things, their parents send them during their school holidays -- and find that if I give them too much freedom to speak at first, they don't know what to do with it, and spend their time looking to me to see what to do. I, of course, look away :) 

More seriously, if they don't take the ball and run with it, I'll give them prompts when doing a rod story (like time words, or verbs they have to use), and that keeps the story from getting off track, and is more reassuring for them.

-Don, I love the idea of the clapping thing. It reminds me of something I also like to do with teenagers (though yours is definitely better): I give each of them 3 rods (long enough that they can stand or lay them on a table and the difference will be visible) and start by saying something like TA ta, then ta TA, ta TA ta, etc. They quickly understand what to do (lay the rods which represent the unstressed syllables and stand the other), and we add more rods until they have 6 and we can work on the music of what sounds like sentences. For example, _ I _ _ I would be ta TA ta ta TA, something like (I WANT you to SEE this or you DIDn't reMIND me').

After that, we'll go onto words that I'll say: first, easy ones like computer, telephone, table, guitar, whatever, and then more unexpected ones like chocolate, opera, interesting, where the number of syllables they 'expect' isn't what they hear (in France, kids are taught that syllables are written, not spoken, so a word like 'cerise', the French for 'cherry', wink wink, will be seen as having 3 syllables, ce, ri, se, even though you only hear 2 beats). Of course, this isn't something I do for my first class with them, but maybe at some point on the second full day of class, so that they're more aware of the music of English. After that, it's easy to get them to put 'music' into their sentences when they say them.

That's it for now -- I'm not sure I'm being of any help to your friend, Cedric, but I'm certainly enjoying the discussion!

Caren

[Roslyn Young]

Hello everyone,

I'm enjoying the discussion too. Thanks for asking the question, Cédric. Don, I loved your clapping example too. I'll definitely add that to my toolkit.

Like Caren, and working in the same school as her until I retired, I also taught these one-week intensives to French teenagers sent by their parents during their school holidays. The group I chose to teach was the group with the 16 and 17 year-olds who had 5 or 6 years of school English and whose score on the entry test was usually between 5 and 10 out of 50. As you can imagine, they could think of all sorts of ways to better spend the last week of their summer holidays than doing English!

I always began by asking them in turn, and in French, to describe their strong points in English and pinpoint their weaker ones. These were almost always grammar and pronunciation and, well, all the rest too. I asked them this question, not to humiliate them, but to make sure that everyone in the class knew that they were not the worst, that the class was made up only of students like themselves, and I told them that this is why I asked the question. I also told them that I was a specialist in teaching classes like this one, and that at the end of the thirty hours, we would go up to the cafeteria, sit around a table together for an hour and speak only in English. Obviously, they didn't believe me, and made it known.

Since they didn't have an oral exam at the end of their studies, I decided to neglect pronunciation except for a rather primitive version of stress and reduction (with the emphasis on reduction, since this is what allowed me to get them to say each sentence several times over.) If anything more was required along the way, we did it as needed. However, all the work we did was oral, so they talked throughout the course. And of course the class conversation rule was consistently applied: every sentence must be true.

I focussed entirely on Glenys Hanson's Verb Tense system for the whole week, using its most streamlined and simplest version, rather than the more subtle one she developed over the following years.

I laid out the paper, drew the lines on it, and then spent the next hour getting the tenses out of the students one by one. By lunchtime on the Monday, they could see that this way of working was going to be quite different from what they were used to, and some were starting to get vaguely interested. 

I was very authoritarian. For example, when we were working on the Simple Present, I would work on the vertical arrow with them:

and then say, "Fred, you make a true sentence about your life using one of these words". Suppose Fred said "I usually drink coffee", then I would get him to add a few words to anchor his sentence better in reality by making it a little longer or more complex: in this case, perhaps adding 'for breakfast'. Then I would ask for the complementary sentence, "I rarely drink tea".

"Now Léa, you make a sentence." And I made all the students make sentences all day every day, correcting them as we went along, moving from tense to tense, and then combining these to make more complex sentences. We did no explicit grammar; we only used triggers to create the appropriate sentences for each of the tenses. I corrected everything as we went along.

I'm recounting this because I wouldn't consider that what I did was "good Silent Way". Some of it was not Silent Way at all. I talked much more than usual and 'gave' them more. I was authoritarian with them, but then this is what these students expected, and we didn't have time for me to develop the niceties of the 'silent' Silent Way. However, as the week progressed, I was usually able to be less heavy-handed as they became more open to the work we were doing, and by the Friday, they were not far from being able to have a class conversation by themselves, with some prodding from me. And as a matter of principle, we always went up to the cafeteria at the end of the week, sat around the table and spoke in something resembling English for an hour.

For me, the Silent Way is an excellent way of working when it can be used as is (though with a little time for adaptation with almost all classes). But I'd like to say that what's important in the classroom is not the Silent Way, it's the students, and they may well have to be trained up quite a lot until they can use themselves correctly to learn. As they gain in autonomy, I can become more 'Silent Way' with them. If we had had another week, I think these students would probably have developed the capacity to work using the real Silent Way. 

I hope this helps. Since I don't know how many years of English your friend's students have had, this might be entirely off the track for his classes.

Ros

PS If anyone doesn't know Glenys's Verb Tense System, let me know and I'll post something about it here.

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