This document discusses the advantages and disadvantages of using Total Physical Response (TPR) as a language teaching method, and provides examples of TPR activities. The key advantages are that TPR is fun, easy to implement, does not require much preparation, is good for vocabulary learning, works for classes of any size, and is effective for teenagers and young learners. However, it is not very creative and does not allow students to express their own views. The activities described are Simon Says, a school race, using theatre techniques, and action songs.

1. Cristina Dumitru
Carmen García Navarro
Elena Martín Cabañas
Marta Martin-Luengo Ruiz

2. ADVANTAGES:
 It is fun and easy.
 It does not require a great deal of preparation on the
part of the teacher.
 It is a good tool for learning vocabulary.
 Class size does not need to be a problem.
 There is no age barrier.
 It is very effective with teenagers and young learners.

3. DISADVANTAGES
• It is not a very creative method. Students are not given
the opportunity to express their own views and thoughts
in a creative way.
• It is easy to overuse TPR.
• It is limited, since everything cannot be explained with
this method. It must be combined with other
approaches.

4. ACTIVITIES:
Simon Says Game
The School Race
Theatre
Action Songs

5. SIMON SAYS GAME!
1. The students are in front of a
wall.
2. The teacher gives instructions to
the students. For example:
“Simon says to put your hands in
the air”.
3. They should follow the
instructions, so they advance a
step.
4. The students that follow all the
instructions will win, because
they reach the goal.

6. THE SCHOOL RACE
With “The Amazing Race” as one of the activities, the class will be
racing to language acquisition.
1. The teacher have to group the class into four or five teams. Each
team have to be composed of three to four players.
2. The teacher gives the task to children verbally. For example, one
task can be a “bring me” scenario and the teacher can tell the
teams to bring him an yellow object. Or the class can shout their
favorite color.
3. They can go outside the classroom for this activity and have it in
the schoolyard. The teacher tell to the students to bring in the
garbage bins, pick up twenty dried leaves, arrange flower pots in a
line, etc.

7. THEATRE
• Your role as the teacher is to
narrate and move the story
forward by telling the characters in
front of the class what they need
to do.
• First, you have to decide what
your play will be. Knowing this,
you have to decide also the
number of characters, the nature
of events in the story, their
reactions to it and distribute de
characters.
• The aim of this game is to practice
listening and comprehension at
the same time students have fun.

8. ACTION SONGS
This is a great memory-improving tool. You can create actions for
any song that you want.
1. Decide the important words in the song.
2. Choose the gestures for your words. There are obvious actions for
some words like “jump”, “look”, etc. But when the song has words
like “hope” or “integrity”, you should be creative. The gestures only
need to be similarity of the thing they signify.
3. Do the actions a little bit of exaggeration; it makes the lyrics of the
song more interesting and vivid for your students. Don´t teach the
song line by line.
The objective here is to let the students understand what they are
singing about.