I was delighted to be asked to contribute an article to
“The Gattegno Effect: 100 Voices on One of History’s Greatest Educators”,
which was published by Educational Solutions in 2011.

Here is the article:
gattegno-tribute-rosie-mcandrew

For those unfamiliar with Gattegno’s Silent Way of Teaching Languages,
I’ll add a couple of details here to clarify references in the article itself.

(By the way, please note that the data shown in the diagrams below 
will be easier to view on a desktop than on a small screen…)

• The Rods – these are a set of Cuisenaire rods,
  initially designed for teaching Maths,
  which Gattegno adapted as tool to represent words, phrases, ideas,
  and elements of grammar, syntax or pronunciation.

A series of colour charts: 

• One with rectangles of colour to represent each sound in a particular language:

• One called a Fidel, containing every spelling combination
  for all the sounds in that language,
  spelt out using the colours in the chart above:

• And 16 word charts, where the basic building blocks of the language
  are spelt out using the colour coding represented in the Fidels.
  (4 of the word charts are illustrated below).

The teacher, and later the students, will use a pointer to create sentences
by indicating individual words, one at a time.
This is done in silence, so that the whole class can focus attentively on meaning and grammar.
After each sentence has been pointed out, the students may speak it aloud.

The ideas of the sentences can relate to elements in a picture, for example,
or items in the classroom; or arrangements of the rods,
either in response to what they see,
or to prompt a demonstration of meaning.