- The project

"SilentWay" is an attempt to implement the system devised by the mathematician and philosopher Caleb Gattegno (1910-1988) for language learning. During a field mission for the UNESCO in Ethiopia, in the late fifties, Gattegno observed that the natives learned their language, amahric, with the help of colored boards. This gave him the intuition of his system, which he later called "Reading with colors". He applied his method both to first-language acquisition (i. e. children learning their mother tongue and adults with little or no school background) and to learners of second (or foreign) languages. He also applied his approach to the teaching of elementary mathematics. In all cases, the learner plays an active role and the teacher mostly acts as a silent guide - hence the name "Silent Way" which Gattegno gave to his system as a whole.

Towards the end of his life C. Gattegno began to implement his didactical approach computationally, only prevented from achieving his goal by death. The aim of this project is to further explore the ways he thus opened. As the use of colors makes a graphical user interface an essential part of the system - in fact, it is its main entrance - Java should be the most appropriate language to implement such an interface. Moreover, the "Silent Way" approach exploits the formal, algebraic and combinatoric properties of language - which Gattegno called "the algebra of language ". Such formal properties could best be exploited by a logic-based language like Prolog (or one of its derivatives). Even though a number of applications of Gattegno's approach, both in the public domain and commercial, already exist, the combination of Java for the handling of the graphical part of the system and of Prolog for its reasoning part as not yet been attempted, to my knowledge.

- What are my motivations in proposing this project?

I have taught languages for many years, including to foreign adults learning French, my mother tongue, as a second language. I always have been confronted with the scarcity of any valid methodical approach for this particular type of learning, which is quite different from first-language acquisition. More recently, I have been confronted with the problems of asylum applicants and refugees, with little or no school training, in Switzerland. To help these persons, who come from the most varied cultural backgrounds, acquire the basics of French in order to accelerate their integration, is a major challenge. I believe that Gattegno's approach can be an appropriate answer to this demand.

- My background

I was born in 1946 in Geneva, Switzerland. I began both college and professional training as a newspaper reporter in the United States in the mid-sixties. I obtained my degree in French from the University of Geneva in 1984 and my master's degree in computational linguistics from the same university in 1989. I received a second master's, in computer science, from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in 1996. From that time on I worked on a number of projects as a researcher in computational linguistics, both at the Federal Institute of Technology and at the University of Geneva. I am currently working full-time on my e-learning project, based on C. Gattegno's approach.

I published two books, the first being based on my experience as a secondary school teacher. A thid book is due for publication soon.