Total Physical Response (TPR)

Total Physical Response (TPR)

TPR is a language teaching method built around the co-ordination of speech and action; it attempts to teach language through physical (motor) activity. Developed by James Asher, a professor of psychology at San Jose Sate University, California, it draws on several traditions, including developmental psychology, learning theory and humanistic pedagogy.

Asher sees successful adult second language learning as a parallel process to child first language acquisition. He claims that speech directed at young children consists primarily of commands, which children respond to physically before they begin to produce verbal responses. He also felt that speaking should follow comprehension; only when students were comfortable with comprehension should they feel it necessary to produce language.

In the classroom, the learning takes place through the teacher giving instructions, which the students follow. Miming plays a large part, as does visualisation and imagination, e.g. students are asked to imagine that Pedro is a house, which can lead to instructions such as “knock on the door of the house” etc.

His approach or view of language was not quite clear. He seemed to use a mixture of inductive and deductive approaches:

Abstractions should be delayed until students have internalised a detailed cognitive map of the target languages. Abstractions are not necessary for people to decode the grammatical structure of language. Once students have internalised the code, abstractions can be introduced and explained in the target language.

He elaborated more on what he felt facilitated or inhibited foreign language learning:

There exists a specific innate bio-programme for language learning, which defines an optimal path for first and second language development. Brain lateralisation defines different learning functions in the left and right brain hemispheres. Stress (an effective filter) intervenes between the act of learning and what is to be learnt; the lower the stress, the greater the learning.

Finally, Asher did not view TPR as having to be the only method employed in the classroom:

We are not advocating only one strategy of learning. Even if the imperative is the major or minor format of training, variety is critical for maintaining continued student interest. The imperative is a powerful facilitator of learning, but it should be used in conjunction with many other techniques. The optimal combination will vary from instructor to instructor and class to class.

The quotation begs the question, what are abstractions? Tense, aspect, articles etc. – are they abstractions?

He seems to endorse the attitude that lexical chunks are central, and worth learning, but he does not elaborate on this.