Making Silent Way Materials
sound, stress and spelling; its availability when it is needed; the extent of its completeness; the ease with which derived words can be formed as well as their modification and contractions, and the sentences which use them will constitute those tests which must be passed for the classroom materials to be considered as acceptable and worthy of being offered to the public. Because, over the years, we found that our selection of the linguistic situations with the rods provided the meanings for which the stringing of the words on the charts with the pointer, allowed the students to make the corresponding statements, and thus the functional vocabulary appears to be conditioned by the existence of the set of rods. This is a true appearance, but still only an appearance. A lot of work must be done on the language so as to extract from it what is needed in order to say in that language that which is being perceived innerly or outwardly as needing expression. The perception of the meaning allows students to concentrate on the acquisition of the functional vocabulary and the utterances they would have to make in the new language to correspond to those meanings. Hence the role of the situations with the rods is to free the students to have to resort to their memory and to their native language, to find what to say in the new language and which corresponds to their perception of situations. From that liberation, the students gain their full power to learn, to enter into new uses of themselves, like uttering new strings of new sounds and attending to their stresses, connections, their placing on a melodic line belonging to the new language and that in the shortest possible time. This, because of their awareness of what they have to do and can do. This, in turn, supports a functional retention without any need for drill and repetition. All of the above tells us that the selection of the functional vocabulary — which is the most important part of the generation of the Silent Way materials — goes far beyond a user of that language as a native and of owning vocabulary, but calls on powers of discrimination, on sensitivities and judgments of algebraic links between words and particles capable of generating the functional set. The twenty-six languages that have been treated to date have each represented a unique and special challenge which has required a renewal of the author. Such preparation is what needs to be looked into by anyone intending to embark upon such adventures.
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