•Like Audiolingualism, the Silent Way (Gattegno 1972, 1976) can be characterized by the attention paid to accuracy of production of both the sounds and structures of the target language from the very initial stage of instruction.  Not only are individual sounds stressed from the very first day of a Silent Way class, but learners' attention is focused on how words combine in phrases - on how blending, stress, and intonation all shape the production of an utterance.  Proponents claim that this enables Silent Way learners to sharpen their own inner criteria for accurate production.  The difference between Audiolingualism and the Silent Way, however, is that in the Silent Way learner attention is focused on the sound system without having to learn a phonetic alphabet or a body of explicit linguistic information.