1. TOTAL PHYSICAL
RESPONSE
What Is TPR?
"Babies don't learn by memorizing lists;
why should children or adults?"
Mtra. Graciela Bilat
2. IT’S ALL IN THE WAY WE LEARN...
Total Physical Response (TPR), which is an ESL methodology developed by
James J. Asher, has been in use for nearly thirty years.
TPR is based on the premise that the human brain has a biological program for
acquiring any natural language on earth - including the sign language of the
deaf. The process is visible when we observe how infants internalize their first
language.
The secret is a unique "conversation" between the parent and infant. For
example, the first conversation is a parent saying,
"Look at daddy. Look at daddy." The infant's face
turns in the direction of the voice and daddy
exclaims, "She's looking at me! She's looking at me!"
Dr. Asher calls this "a language-body conversation"
because the parent speaks and the infant answers
with a physical response such as looking, smiling,
laughing, turning, walking, reaching, grasping,
holding, sitting, running, and so forth.
Notice that these "conversations" continue for many
many months before the child utters anything more
intelligible than "mommy" or "daddy." Although
the infant is not yet speaking, the child is
imprinting a linguistic map of how the language
works. Silently, the child is internalizing the patterns and sounds of the target
language.
When the child has decoded enough of the target language, speaking appears
spontaneously. The infant's speech will not be perfect, but gradually, the child's
utterances will approximate more and more that of a native speaker.
Mtra. Graciela Bilat
3. IDEAS TO USE TPR IN THE
CLASSROOM:
CLASSROOM:
1. You are your hand
If there are problems with lack of space, noise, discipline and/ or potential
breakages in the classroom with students running around, you can get them
doing the usual action words for pre-school classes like “run” and “jump” with
one hand representing the person (a fist with the first two fingers extended
down to represent legs) and the other hand as the ground (open palm face up).
2. You are an animal
This is a variation on You Are Your Hand that demands less imagination but
more equipment. Give each student a puppet or plastic animal to do the mimes
with. If you don’t have enough for one per student, you can give it to each
student at a time and let the class shout out instructions like “jump on the
teacher”. This can also be combined with Sensible Animal Mimes below.
3. Animals and actions
You can combine animals and actions and add fun with instructions like “the
rabbit is jumping” (making rabbit ears on your head while jumping) or “the
elephant is stomping its feet” (swinging one arm in front of your nose as its
trunk while stomping your feet).
4. Simon says
Students only do the action you say when you start the sentence with “Simon
says…” and should stay still if you say just the action word (”Jump!”). To add
competition you can add or take away points or eliminate people if they move
when you don’t say “Simon says…”. More useful language than “Simon
says…” you can use to start the sentences includes “Your teacher says…” and
“You should/ can/ must…”,
5. Simon lies
Students only copy the teacher when the thing they say and the thing they do
is the same, e.g. when they say “jump” and jump. If the words and action don’t
match (jumping and saying “sleep”) the children should stay still.
6. Steven lies too
Students ignore what the teacher is doing and only do what they say, e.g. if
they are hopping and saying “Jump”, the kids jump.
7. Sensible animal mimes
Mtra. Graciela Bilat
4. In this variation on Animals and Actions, students only follow the instructions
if the teacher says a sentence that is true in nature, e.g. “A bird flies” but not “A
snake plays tennis”.
8. Sensible object mimes
Students only do the mime if it possible with the object the teacher names, e.g.
stay still for “Eat a ball” but act for “Ride an elephant”
9. TPR questions
You can use mime to help students answer questions, remember the questions,
understand the individual words in a question and/ or take part in question
drilling even if they are too shy to speak. For example with “What’s your
name?” you can mime shoulders hunched with palms up for “question/
what”, a cupped palm facing towards another person for “your” and pointing
at a real or imagined name badge for “name”.
10. Quickly slowly actions
An easy variation on any kind of TPR actions practice is just getting the
students to do it slowly and quickly. This adds two pieces of vocabulary that
are very useful for classroom instructions and makes revision of previous
vocabulary more interesting.
11. Left right actions
Another easy variation on almost any action is to add left and right, e.g. “Hop
on your left foot” or “Play basketball with your left hand”
12. Little big actions
Another easy and fun variation is getting students to do alternate big and small
jumps/ steps/ hops etc. Please note that these are all the nouns of the action
words, whereas most of the other examples here are verbs.
13. Opposite actions
Dealing with actions as opposites not only makes them more memorable but
can also add an element of fun, e.g. do “climb up, climb up, climb up” with the
tension building and then “fall down!”
14. Action songs
There are many kindergarten songs for the kinds of actions you typically teach
pre-school EFL classes, such as clap, stomp, nod, shout (all in the popular song
“If You’re Happy and You Know It”), brush, wash, wave, (in various versions
of “Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush”) etc.
15. Action story books/ picture books
Lots of books designed for pre-school native speaker kids work well with EFL
learners as well and have lots of action words in them, for example “From
Head to Toe” by Eric Carle and “We’re Going on a Bear Hunt”
Mtra. Graciela Bilat
