himself as succeeding, or as failing? Is he, in his own eyes, one of the moving forces in the learning process, or is he only a pawn?
Emphasis on this vertical axis is one of the interesting features of what Dr. Gattegno calls his Silent Way of teaching languages. During the first part of the course, all talking is about a set of small wooden blocks which differ from each other only in length and color, and are little more than concrete abstractions. At this stage, exploitation of the horizontal axis has been reduced to what must surely be its very narrowest minimum. But it is this very annihilation of the horizontal axis, coupled with the almost complete silence of the teacher, that allows and indeed forces both student and teacher to focus their attention on the introspective--on what resources are available from within the student, on what is taking shape within his mind, and what he is ready to do at any given moment. In the short run, and with a teacher who can focus his attention on the inside of the student's mind, the vertical axis may be sufficient for motivation. In the long run, of course, it is not.[1] In fact, motivation depends on connecting something on the horizontal axis of external experience with something on the vertical axis of the student's appreciation of himself. It is the vertical axis, however, that language teachers talk and write about the least.
Like our view of operants (p.18), our view of favorable results or rewards which will 'reinforce' those operants has been too narrow. For long-term, extrinsic motivation we have placed too much reliance on reference to 'spiritual goals,' or to 'an experience which is essential to understanding the world [one]
- ↑ In Gattegno's system, the wooden blocks are followed by a series of pictures which are still about as unrelated to the horizontal kind of external, interesting reality as it is possible for pictures of real objects to be, but which provide the imaginative teacher with opportunities to begin creative expansion of the student's vocabulary.
22
