Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Part I Major language trends in twentieth-century language teaching
- Part II Alternative approaches and methods
- 5 Total Physical Response
- 6 The Silent Way
- 7 Community Language Learning
- 8 Suggestopedia
- 9 Whole Language
- 10 Multiple Intelligences
- 11 Neurolinguistic Programming
- 12 The lexical approach
- 13 Competency-Based Language Teaching
- Part III Current communicative approaches
- Author index
- Subject index
5 - Total Physical Response
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 06 July 2010
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Part I Major language trends in twentieth-century language teaching
- Part II Alternative approaches and methods
- 5 Total Physical Response
- 6 The Silent Way
- 7 Community Language Learning
- 8 Suggestopedia
- 9 Whole Language
- 10 Multiple Intelligences
- 11 Neurolinguistic Programming
- 12 The lexical approach
- 13 Competency-Based Language Teaching
- Part III Current communicative approaches
- Author index
- Subject index
Summary
Background
Total Physical Response (TPR) is a language teaching method built around the coordination of speech and action; it attempts to teach language through physical (motor) activity. Developed by James Asher, a professor of psychology at San Jose State University, California, it draws on several traditions, including developmental psychology, learning theory, and humanistic pedagogy, as well as on language teaching procedures proposed by Harold and Dorothy Palmer in 1925. In a developmental sense, Asher sees successful adult second language learning as a parallel process to child first language acquisition. He claims that speech directed to young children consists primarily of commands, which children respond to physically before they begin to produce verbal responses. Asher feels that adults should recapitulate the processes by which children acquire their native language.
Asher shares with the school of humanistic psychology a concern for the role of affective (emotional) factors in language learning. A method that is undemanding in terms of linguistic production and that involves gamelike movements reduces learner stress, he believes, and creates a positive mood in the learner, which facilitates learning.
Approach: Theory of language and learning
TPR reflects a grammar-based view of language. Asher states that “most of the grammatical structure of the target language and hundreds of vocabulary items can be learned from the skillful use of the imperative by the instructor” (1977: 4). He views the verb, and particularly the verb in the imperative, as the central linguistic motif around which language use and learning are organized.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Approaches and Methods in Language Teaching , pp. 73 - 80Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2001