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What is Total Physical Response (TPR)?
The Total Physical Response (TPR) method of language teaching was invented by Dr. James J. Asher in 1969. (Asher) In it, the author sought to teach students their second languages more similarly to how they learned their first.
Humans do not learn their first language at a desk memorizing lists of vocabulary words, but by experiencing and interacting with the words in a physical context. In Total Physical Response, students use their whole bodies to act out words and sentences in order to give their brains multiple sensory inputs that make the memory stronger and more robust.
Since then, teachers have continued to use this strategy, especially for younger students, but does modern research continue to back up this theory of teaching? How can teachers best utilize the theory of Total Physical Response in practical activities during class?
This article will answer those questions as well as going into the science behind the theory to see whether this dated theory still stands the test of time.
Total Physical Response Examples
Total Physical Response is most often seen in language classrooms where teachers will have students mime actions or create representative gestures for things. This helps create a direct connection in the brain between the new word and the concept rather than connecting the new word to the translation in their mother tongue.
For example, a teacher might want to teach the students the word mountain and have the students repeat mountain while putting their hands above their head in a triangle. Similarly, a teacher could have the students put their fingers almost together and say “small” then open their arms wide and say “large”.
To increase complexity, teachers can ask students to do certain actions like “Let’s walk” or “Let’s jump!” as students follow the commands moving around the classroom. More layers of complexity can always be added by using adjectives or adverbs.
The teacher could say “Let’s walk quickly”, “Let’s walk slowly” or “Let’s do a big jump!” The more nuance the teacher can add, the more words students can learn and interact with in a fun and energetic way.
Total Physical Response is also very useful for helping students to see where the words are within a sentence. Beginners have a hard time distinguishing where the words stop and start when listening to a new language, but if the teacher matches words to gestures, they can more clearly show students where the words are and what they mean.
For example, a teacher could point to themselves when saying “I”, put their thumb up when saying “like” and point at a student when saying “you”. This helps the students to see that the sentence is made up of the three words “I”, “Like” and “You” rather than something with only two words like “Ailai Kyu”.
While Total Physical Response is most often used in language classrooms, it can be applied to other subjects as well in some situations. Many concepts from other subjects can be hard to create gestures for, but when possible, it can be useful for simplifying hard to visualize concepts.
For example, a teacher could have young math students put up a finger to indicate addition and take a finger away to represent subtraction. They could also open their fist to represent multiplication and close their fist to represent division.
Teachers can help students see why the gestures represent the concepts and then not only will students have a better understanding of what the words mean, but will have something simple to jog their memory later. Teachers using these types of strategies will often see the students mimicking the gesture during test time seeing that, in this example, 2 fists times 5 fingers equals 10 fingers.
Even older students can benefit from Total Physical Response. While it is often impossible to capture the entire meaning of the more complex vocabulary older students are learning, sometimes a gesture that simply captures the important distinction between similar difficult vocabulary words can be extremely helpful.
For example, students often confuse the words infer and imply. A teacher wanting to utilize Total Physical Response might have students point toward themselves when saying infer and point away from themselves when saying imply. While this gesture does not demonstrate the entire meaning of either word, it helps students remember which way the suggestion is going.
Similarly, students learning about deductive vs. inductive reasoning could use Total Physical Response to help them keep the two ideas separate. Students’ arms can start wide and go in to show how deductive reasoning takes many pieces of evidence to make one claim and start close and go wide to represent inductive reasoning taking one case and creating a larger theory.
Every subject will have occasional vocab words that can benefit from the use of Total Physical Response, but knowing which ones and what gestures to use will be up to the professional judgment of the teacher. Not all words are well suited to a gesture and forcing the issue to have students constantly using gestures will quickly get tiresome and lose its effectiveness.
The Theory Behind Total Physical Response
There are several scientific theories and schools of thought that are being applied simultaneously in Total Physical Response. Total Physical Response combines the theories of Multisensory Learning with Communicative Language Teaching to ensure that students learn via multiple sensory routes and in a realistic context.
Multisensory Learning is the theory that the more sensory pathways that are activated while learning, such as an auditory pathway and a visual pathway, the better the idea will be learned. Not only does the student gain a greater understanding of what they are learning about due to experiencing it in multiple ways, they also have multiple routes in the brain that can be used to access the memory making recall easier when needed.
Communicative Language Teaching is an approach to language teaching where vocabulary and grammar are taught using activities that mimic realistic communication rather than through books and worksheets. Because students have to listen and respond by mimicking the action, much like an infant or toddler will mimic their parents, Total Physical Response is inherently a Communicative Language Teaching approach.
Total Physical Response marries these two theories into a clearer picture of how language learning works most effectively from two perspectives. Multisensory Learning looks at what is going on inside the brain while Communicative Language Teaching focuses on what is going on outside the body.
However, there is also a third benefit of Total Physical Response due to its emphasis on physical movement. Previous research has shown that gestures can be used to improve memory recall. (Mathias)
Movement, sensation, and purposeful communication are all combined in Total Physical Response which makes it beneficial for students of all learning styles and effective based on how our brains work. While not always practical, teachers should always be keeping the ideas of Total Physical Response in mind to try and add into lessons whenever appropriate.
In addition to being backed by solid theory, there are multiple recent case studies, such as this one, or this one, that show that the mindful implementation of Total Physical Response approaches to teaching lead to better outcomes for students (Dewi and Fatmawati) (Zur and Selfieni). While not appropriate in all situations, this evidence-based practice is clearly useful in a large variety of situations for a majority of students and should not be overlooked.
Total Physical Response Games
There are several fun games that can be used with children and adults to help them learn language with the approaches of Total Physical Response while also having fun. These games can all be adapted to various proficiency levels by using more complex vocabulary or more limitations.
- Simon Says
Simon Says is very similar to the activity mentioned above where teachers give students an action and phrase such as “touch your nose” and the students mimic and repeat after the teacher. In Simon Says, the students are only supposed to mimic the teacher if the teacher says “Simon says…” before the action such as “Simon says touch your nose”.
If the students do the action, but the teacher did not say “Simon says” before, the student must sit down. The last student left standing who only mimicked the teacher when they said “Simon says” wins.
While fun, Simon Says is really only appropriate for very young language learners. However, for these young language learners, it is a highly effective and flexible game to teach students a variety of nouns, verbs, and even adjectives or adverbs.
Teachers can have students touch, look at, or even move to different places in the room or objects. Students could be told to “Walk to the wall” or “Look at the window” for example.
Complexity can also be increased by adding adjectives or adverbs to the actions such as “quickly” or “slowly”. Additional nouns can also be used to give nuance and complexity to the movements and vocabulary such as by telling students to “Walk (Fly, Jump, Tip Toe, etc to the wall (the door, a window, a desk, etc) like a bear(penguin, T-Rex, Egyptian, etc).”
- Charades
Charades is a great game where the teacher gives a student a vocabulary word such as “dog” or “doctor” and the student must silently use their body to act like the word to get the other students to guess which word they were given. Words can be nouns or even verbs students must act out, but this game struggles to work for other types of words like adjectives and adverbs.
Charades is better for much older children than Simon Says and has a higher element of challenge. However, some students may feel too shy and uncomfortable in front of the class to want to participate, reducing the number of students who benefit from the activity significantly in some classes depending on personalities and culture.
- Crime Time with Mimes
Crime Time with Mimes is a more complex version of Charades that can be played with much older students, even adults. The game is done in several phases and can take a large portion of class time if done mindfully.
Students start off by writing a story about a crime. As the teacher introduces the activity, they should pre-teach vocabulary on crimes such as “murder”, “theft” “criminal” to help students get ideas and practice new vocabulary as they write.
After the students have finished their stories, the teacher will tell the students that they will pretend to have witnessed the crime they wrote about and will tell it like they are reporting it to the police. However, there is one problem, they are mimes and can not speak!
They must act out the story in detail to try and get the students watching who are playing the police to write a crime report that matches the story written by the writer and actor of the story. After the student has acted their story out once or twice, as needed, the students should be given time to write their version of the report as they understood it.
Then go around the room, reading all of the reports with giggling highly encouraged. At the end, the original story is read out and whichever student has the most accurate report gets a point. Whoever has the most points after everyone has acted out their stories wins.
While fun, interactive, creative and great writing practice, this game also requires a certain personality of class to be highly effective. Teachers will need to use their professional judgment to decide whether their students will be willing to make fools of themselves in front of the whole class as they mime committing a crime while everyone is inevitably laughing.
Conclusion
In conclusion, Total Physical Response is a highly effective approach to teaching vocabulary that is based on multiple theories of learning and backed up by practical case studies. While not appropriate in all situations, Total Physical Response should be a regular tool in a teacher’s arsenal to be applied with words or in situations where it is most useful.
However, because Total Physical Response taps into the benefits of multisensory learning while also couching it in the practical context of Communicative Language Teaching, it is an approach that works based on the fundamentals of how humans learn their first languages in childhood. Teachers should rely less on worksheets and textbooks and try to find ways to include more activities that get students moving, acting, and using their language for a purpose other than filling in a blank.
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References
Asher, James J. “The Total Physical Response Approach to Second Language Learning.” The Modern Language Journal, vol. 53, no. 1, 1969, pp. 3–17. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/322091. Accessed 5 Feb. 2023.
Dewi, Noviya Lakshita, and Ayu Fatmawati. “The Implementation of Total Physical Response (TPR) Method to Teach Vocabulary in e-Learning.” Jurnal Pendidikan Bahasa Inggris Proficiency, vol. 4, no. 1, 2022, p. 29., https://doi.org/10.32503/proficiency.v4i1.2246.
Mathias, Brian et al. “Motor Cortex Causally Contributes To Vocabulary Translation Following Sensorimotor-Enriched Training”. The Journal Of Neuroscience, 2021, pp. JN-RM-2249-20. Society For Neuroscience, doi:10.1523/jneurosci.2249-20.2021.
Zur, S., and S. Selfieni. “Students’ Perception of the Implementation on Total Physical Response (TPR) in English Teaching”. International Journal of Transdisciplinary Knowledge, vol. 3, no. 2, Dec. 2022, pp. 26-34, doi:10.31332/ijtk.v3i2.30.
