Revisiting The Silent Way in Online Approaches to Learning Sentence Structure in Academic Writing Tasks

Lawrence Cleary

Reflecting on writing clinics and tutorials given to both L1 and L2 university students who come to class with seemingly little familiarity with much of the traditional meta-linguistic terminology used in writing pedagogy has led to explorations into the literature written on the use of “youser-friendly” and “natural” language as a way of accommodating both different learning styles and the resource and time constraints that preclude the teaching of the traditional, “contrived” meta-language of writing. Terms such as “the main idea”, for instance, for describing independent clauses seem somewhat inadequate when students are faced with genre-specific, authentic models that include examples of some very intricate complex-compound sentence structures that may even incorporate embedded adjectival clauses and many reduced forms such as participle and other non-finite clausal structures. This kind of meta-linguistic avoidance requires a way into the specific academic genre that students are required to enter and emulate and on which the depth of the quality of their emulation is assessed.

Attempts to improve language awareness at the sentential level when encountering student failure to connect with the traditional meta-linguistic terminology has led to some experimentation with more “youser-friendly” expressions combined with bracketing and transformation techniques. However, recent concerns about plagiarism have necessitated that students submit work online into accounts that employ plagiarism-detection software. Such practice has led to online responses utilizing rubrics, which constitute an abbreviated form of meta-language, and to the signalling of both good and poor practices with Microsoft Word features such as the use of underlining, highlighting, and the use of font-color marking. Color “codes” signify the value of the marked feature as it relates to the normative equivalent. Normative equivalents are genre specific.

A failure to lure students to a cognitive connection with language use and structure by traditional means, combined with some perceived success with online feedback-practices has led to a second look at Caleb Gattegno’s “artificial approach” in The Silent Way. The Silent Way’s use of visual devises to promote cognition and recall, its learner-centered, problem-solving approach, its focus on language functions, and its value for autonomous, inductive learning all correlate neatly with the autonomous, learner-centered and alternative learning-style approaches valued in the present day university environment. The use of visuals and non-verbal assignments to assist visual / spatial thinkers with the internalisation of concepts and the organization of ideas finds support in, amongst others, the pedagogical practices of Linda Hecker. 

This study looks at the effectiveness of the use of colored fonts and highlighting as visual coding in online feedback. The coding / commenting focus is on structural choices on the phrasal and clausal levels across texts. Generic norms are presented alongside students’ texts for comparative purposes. Procedures are designed to teach sentence structure inductively through modelling. In order to evaluate the effectiveness of these procedures for teaching structural appropriacy, results are compared to those achieved through more traditional means.