Total Psychical Response

Background

According to the North Carolina Course of Study, Total Physical Response (TPR) is “A teaching approach in which students respond with physical activity to increasingly complex teacher commands (www.ncpublicschools.org).”

Developed by James Asher in the 1970s, TPR is a language teaching method built around the coordination of speech and action.  TPR is linked to the developmental psychology, learning theory, and humanistic pedagogy.  It is based on the belief that the fastest, least stressful way to achieve understanding of any target language is to follow instruction uttered by the instructor without native language translation.

Principles

v Understanding of the target language should be developed before speaking.

v Meaning can often be conveyed through actions, especially by using commands.

v Feelings of success and low anxiety facilitate learning.

v Spoken language should be emphasized over written language.

v Teachers should be tolerant of errors which are expected to be made by students.

v Meaning is more important than form.

How I Use TPR

v At an early level, such as Kindergarten through second grade, students should be first given action verbs and concrete items (Cantoni 1999:53).  In my experience, that has been amended to include emotions.

v The first words I teach them in Kindergarten are stand up and sit down.  They will do this about five times each.  Every class has found this fun.

v Then I will add boys and girls.  So, the boys will stand, then the girls and vice versa.  In just a couple of minutes, they have learned four words through actions.

When do they speak

v The first words I teach them in Kindergarten are stand up and sit down.  They will do this about five times each.  Every class has found this fun.

v Then I will add boys and girls.  So, the boys will stand, then the girls and vice versa.  In just a couple of minutes, they have learned four words through actions.