Teaching Method : TPR

Total Physical Response

Developed by James Asher, a professor of psychology at San Jose State University, California, Total Physical Response is a language teaching method

built around the coordination of speech and action, and it attempts to teach

language through physical (motor) activity.  Students listen to commands in a

target language and then immediately respond with an appropriate physical

action.

When those commands become familiar, the teacher remains seated and

only the students will continue to respond to the teacher's commands. From time to time, some novel utterances will be given by recombining familiar elements together. The students do not have to respond verbally until they are ready. The instructor mainly uses imperative sentences in teaching. According to Asher (2000), most of the grammatical features in a language can be nested in the imperative and that almost any grammatical constituent can be taught through the skillful use of the imperative. There are many kinds of TPR teaching activities: pointing, guessing, performing physical actions, picture work, story telling and acting etc.

This model means that second language learning should be based on the model of first language learning. It has three vital aspects: a).understanding the spoken language must come before speaking, b). understanding is developed through body movements , and c). the listening period creates a readiness to speak.

Stripped down to its essentials, it is a way of using movements, gestures and group dynamics linked with spoken language in the form of commands, to create an atmosphere in which learners quickly and easily acquire comprehension of new vocabulary and structures in a target language. In the process, something called “impulse to language” also comes into play. (Cain, 2000)

TPR is suitable for listening comprehension in theory

1. Literally, listening comprehension means, I listen to the speaker and

understands what he/she says. TPR itself emphasizes listening comprehension. Asher's emphasis on developing comprehension first links himself to a movement in foreign language teaching sometimes referred to as Comprehension Approach (Winitz 1981). The Comprehension Approach scholars share the belief that 
a) comprehension abilities precede productive skills in learning a language; 
b) the learning of speech should be delayed until comprehension skills are established;

c) skills acquired through listening transfer to other skills; and d) teaching

should emphasize learner stress-free environment etc.  In children's acquisition of their first languages, immediately after birth when parents and others utter directions to the infants such as “look at mommy!” “look at daddy”. The infant responds with a physical action which shows that he comprehends the utterances.

So we can see that infants actually comprehend the language before they are able to talk. Therefore if our foreign language learners respond to what they hear with correct physical movements, they are demonstrating that they understand what they hear. 

2. Many of our students complain that whenever they have listening comprehension class, they feel very nervous because the recording is usually played only once and then they will be asked to do some exercises to show how much they understand.  Therefore we often find learners do a very poor job in the exercises, but they are actually not that poor. They report that the more they concentrate, the more nervous they become, and the less they remember. For the foreign language learners, they are often in the transactional listening atmosphere, listening to the recording in the classroom instead of live conversations and speeches. There aren't many paralinguistic signals such as nodding, gesturing and eyeball contacts in the recordings, which to some extent affects their comprehension. Neither do they have opportunity to confirm what they hear with the speaker. That is why they cannot give their best performance in the stressful environment. TPR provides a stress-free environment. The usual transactional listening is to some extent changed into interactional listening.

The tape recorder or the listening teacher becomes the instructor and the

learners become the performers. The teaching becomes interaction between the instructor and the performers. The learners feel fully relaxed. As Morley (1991) points out that all of the listening activities have a 'listen-and-do” format,  which becomes almost a prototype for designing listening activities in the classroom. “Listen-and-do” is just what TPR emphasizes. Therefore TPR activities can be turned into listening tasks.

3. The traditional listening tasks, such as answering questions, True or False

etc,  often include measurement errors, factors other than listening

comprehension are checked and tested (Thompson 1995). Listeners may have

understood what was being said at the time of listening, but by the time they

come to the task questions, the memory trace has been erased by the subsequent information in the text, and also by having to read the questions and answering them because the aural information does not stay in the short term memory for a long time. Listeners are discouraged from not being able to answer the questions, and teachers misunderstand the learners' comprehension ability because they judge from the answers. Those who fail to supply the answers are not at the same proficiency level. Some don't understand at all. Some understand, but forget the necessary  information to answer the questions. But unfortunately our listening tasks cannot tell this difference. 

There are some other very demanding listening tasks like drawing inferences, constructed and open-ended questions. The listeners are not directly tested on what they hear. They need to have one more comprehending process. Failures of this kind of tasks have two implications: the listeners either do not understand the text, or their cognitive operation fails them. Constructed responses have heavier memory and production requirements. For correct responses, we know that the listeners correctly comprehended the text; but the wrong answers don't always mean that the learners cannot understand the text. More problems arise with open-ended questions: more than one answer can be interpreted as correct.

These tasks are more of a test of memory than a measure of meaningful

comprehension, and they are often perceived by the students as a boring activity and simply another vehicle for studying grammar and vocabulary.(Thompson 1995)

The traditional listening tasks test more than just listening comprehension. Extra demand is usually placed on the learners' memory and oral production. TPR activities usually require the learners to demonstrate their comprehension of the listening tasks directly with physical movements or other actions, not with speaking and writing in the target language. Instructors can accurately access the learners' understanding and instantly adjust the difficulty level of the input language and the delivery speed.