Total Physical Response (TPR)
The idea of TPR originates from James Asher, who found that adults’ second or foreign language learning could have similar developmental patterns to that of children’s language acquisition. A baby spends a lot of months listening to the people around it long before it says a word. In Krashen’s The Natural Approach (1983) the students listen to the teacher using the target language communicatively from the beginning of the instruction throughout the course. The teacher helps her students to understand her by using pictures and occasional words in the students’ native language and by being as expressive as possible. In TPR students listen and respond to the spoken target language commands of their teacher.
The goal of TPR is to have the students enjoy their experience in learning to communicate in a foreign language. The TPR was developed in order to reduce the stress people feel when studying foreign languages and encourage students to persist in their study beyond the beginning level of proficiency.
The principles of TPR:
- the teacher is the director of all student behaviour, the students are imitators of her nonverbal model, in 10-20 hours of instruction students will be ready to speak;
- interaction is between the teacher and the whole group of students and with individual students;
- the method is introduced in the students’ native language, after the introduction rarely would the mother tongue be used ;
- grammatical structures and vocabulary are emphasized over other language areas;
- pronunciation is developed through listening mostly;
- culture is the lifestyle of people who speak the language natively;
- skills: understanding the spoken word should precede its production, the spoken language is emphasized over written language, students often do not learn to read the commands they have already learnt to perform until after 10 hours of instruction;
- formal evaluations can be conducted by commanding individual students to perform a series of actions;
- teachers should be tolerant of errors and only correct major errors, even these should be corrected gently;
- the syllabus is multi-strand.
Activities characteristic of the method:
- using commands to direct behaviour
- role reversal (Students command their teacher and classmates to perform some actions. Students will want to speak after 10 to 20 hours of instruction.
Students should not be encouraged to speak until they are ready.)
