Teaching Tip: EFL Lesson Scenario and Plan - 3

Name:

Maria Ester Barrio Flores and Angelina Cavallo

Economy:

Chile 

School:

Santiago Centro Teachers Network

Subject:

English as a Foreign Language

Tip:

Total Physical Response

Having fun in the classroom with T.P.R. activities

Students have different learning styles. Some of them learn by reading, others by writing, drawing, repeating, or simply by listening.

Drs. Rita and Kenneth Dunn proposed a model that categorizes learning styles according to the natural senses: auditory, visual, and kinesthetic. Students who learn best by visual methods prefer to study quietly on their own, while auditory and kinesthetic learners need a more active experience in the classroom to get the proposed objective. However, when we look up high school English text books we observe that most of the exercises are focused on reading and listening, and a few of them are focused on writing and speaking. But basic school text books do include exercises related to T.P.R.  For example: “Do it”, “Act it out”, “Mime” and so on. In most of our planning, there are no activities related to T.P.R activities which help students with a kinesthetic memory to get better results when learning English as a foreign language.

It is taken for granted that when students get to high school they must not move around the classroom, so activities are oriented to reading and writing mainly. The fact is that teachers do not usually take into account that we must give a chance to all students to master the given material according to their own learning style.

So then, the teachers of our Network Santiago Centro decided to work on a project based on the idea that high school students could also use their kinesthetic style if we designed class activities that make them have fun and learn too. Our project would involve learning opportunities to those students whose kinesthetic memory make them enjoy activities implying movement. These activities would allow students to develop themselves, not only individually, but also with their classmates in amusing tasks going further than the simple memorization of concepts and ideas.

When we started reading Dr. James J. Asher articles about T.P.R. activities we made a quick enquiry among the teachers in our network ,we found out the following:

• Few teachers knew about T.P.R,and used in their lessons. 
• Some of them knew about T.P.R but they did not apply it because of different reasons (students’ shyness; lack of self-confidence, both on the students and the teachers; lack of easy material availability; among others).

Then we devoted ourselves to learn more about the topic: “T.P.R. is based on the idea that the natural response to understanding a command is a physical response”. After designing the activities, we practiced them in the classroom, and we selected some of them to be filmed. Our recording includes part of some classes in which TPR activities were exercised, and it also contains a sample of the activities done for the students in pairs or group work.

We hope our project about T.P.R. activities can motivate and encourage teachers to include this strategy in their English lessons.

“Physical actions bring language to life and make it easy to remember.” (J. Asher)

Video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fwT1lpGWob0