October 28, 2011

Reflection on Total Physical Response (TPR)

Among the few groups divided, I was in the Taiwanese group where there were other five “students” and the “teacher”. And through the activity of acting as a student learning several words and sentences in Taiwanese from the teacher, I found that the learning would be more effective and it would be easier for students to understand the commands given by the teacher if those commands are action sequences, particularly when they are given in the order of events happening in a specific situation. For instance, our group learned in the first fifteen minutes of actions like “rolling up the sleeves”, “tying the shoelaces”, and “wearing glasses”, while in the following fifteen minutes the teacher first set a situation as “a car accident”, and the students were given an action sequence in the order of “inserting the key”, “starting the engine”, “speeding up”, and “falling down from the scooter”. And it’s obvious that the students understood the latter commands better than the former ones that were a series of irrelevant actions.

Also, it’s interesting that because most of the “students” in our group, though not being fluent, had certain understanding and familiarity with Taiwanese, therefore the students tended to repeat what the teacher was saying while acting out the teacher’s commands. In comparison, when it was my turn to be the teacher and I tried to teach the other group members some Thai words I came up with, the students this time turned out to pay more attention on understanding and following the commands and nearly spoke. However, it was a really fun experience practicing Total Physical Response in class this week.

Finally, I’d like to compare TPR with The Silent Way, one of the methods we’ve learned earlier. Both of the methods involve more physical phases, but in The Silent Way, students are expected to speak out with the teacher’s instructions while TPR allows students just to mimic and choose to speak when they feel ready to do so. Thus, as one of the conclusions for our group discussion, we think that students who are taught with TPR are given more security in the learning process, and the atmosphere of TPR is also to lessen students’ anxiety.

0推薦此文章
Today's Visitors: 0 Total Visitors: 27
Personal Category: Uncategorized Articles Topic: learning / education / linguistic

Post A Comment









Yes No



Please input the magic number:

( Prevent the annoy garbage messages )
( What if you cannot see the numbers? )
Please input the magic number

誰來收藏
Loading ...
unlog_NVPO 0