Total Physical Response

Total physical response was developed by James Asher, a professor emeritus of psychology at San José State University. It attempts to teach language through physical (motor) activity. 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.

Total Physical Response holds that the more often or the more intensively a memory connection is traced, the stronger the memory association will be and the more likely it will be recalled.

Retracing can be done verbally (e.g., by repetition) and/or in association with motor activity. Combined tracing activities, such as verbal practice accompanied by motor activity, increases the probability of success.

In a developmental sense, TPR claims that speech directed to young children consists primarily of commands, which children respond to physically before they begin to produce verbal responses. It perceives adults should recapitulate the processes by which children acquire their mother tongue.

TPR shares with the school of humanistic psychology a concern for the role of emotional factors in language learning. A method that is lenient in terms of linguistic production and that involves gamelike movements reducing learners’ stress and creating a positive mood in the learner, will facilitate learning.

Asher’s emphasis on developing comprehension skills before the learner is taught to speak . This refers to several different comprehension-based language teaching proposals, which belief that

(a) comprehension abilities precede productive skills in learning a language;
(b) the teaching of speaking should be delayed until comprehension skills are established;
(c) skills acquired through listening transfer to other skills;
(d) teaching should emphasize meaning rather than form; and (e) teaching should minimize learner stress.

The emphasis on comprehension and the use of physical actions to teach a foreign language at an introductory level has a long tradition in language teaching.

Asher views the verb, and particularly the verb in the imperative, as the central linguistic motif around which language use and learning are organized.

TPR sees language as being composed of abstractions and non-abstractions.

non-abstractions being most specifically represented by concrete nouns and imperative verbs. He believes that learners can acquire a “detailed cognitive map” as well as “the grammatical structure of a language” without recourse to abstractions.
abstractions should be delayed until students have internalized a detailed cognitive map of the target language. Abstractions are not necessary for people to decode the grammatical structure of a language. Once students have internalized the code, abstractions can be introduced and explained in the target language.

This is an interesting claim about language but one that is insufficiently detailed to test. For example, are tense, aspect, articles, and so forth, abstractions, and if so, what sort of “detailed cognitive map” could be constructed without them?

Asher also refers in passing to the fact that language can be internalized as wholes or chunks, rather than as single lexical items, but he does not elaborate further on his views of chunking.

He sees a stimulus-response view as providing the learning theory underlying language teaching pedagogy. In addition, he has elaborated an account of what he feels facilitates or inhibits foreign language learning. For this dimension of his learning theory he draws on three rather influential learning hypotheses :

1. There exists a specific innate bio-program for language learning, which defines an optimal path for first and second language development.

2. Brain lateralization defines different learning functions in the left- and right-brain hemispheres.

3. Stress (an affective filter) intervenes between the act of learning and what is to be learned; the lower the stress, the greater the learning.

The general objectives of TPR are to teach oral proficiency at a beginning level. Comprehension is a means to an end, and the ultimate aim is to teach basic speaking skills. A TPR course aims to produce learners who are capable of communicating to a native speaker.

Total Physical Response requires initial attention to meaning rather than to the form of items. Grammar is thus taught inductively. Grammatical features and vocabulary items are selected not according to their frequency of need or use in target language situations, but according to the situations in which they can be used in the classroom and the ease with which they can be learned.

The criterion for including a vocabulary item or grammatical feature at a particular point in training is ease of assimilation by students. If an item is not learned rapidly, this means that the students are not ready for that item. Withdraw it and try again at a future time in the training program.

Asher suggests that a fixed number of items be introduced at a time, to facilitate ease of differentiation and assimilation. “In an hour, it is possible for students to assimilate 12 to 36 new lexical items depending upon the size of the group and the stage of training”.

The movement of the body seems to be a powerful mediator for the understanding, organization and storage of macro-details of linguistic input. Language can be internalized in chunks, but alternative strategies must be developed for fine-tuning to macro-details.

A course designed around Total Physical Response principles, however, would not be expected to follow a TPR syllabus exclusively.

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.

Imperative drills are the major classroom activity in Total Physical Response. They are typically used to elicit physical actions and activity on the part of the learners.

Conversational dialogues are delayed until after about 120 hours of instruction. Asher’s rationale for this is that “everyday conversations are highly abstract and disconnected; therefore to understand them requires a rather advanced internalization of the target language”.

Other class activities include role plays and slide presentations. Role plays center on everyday situations, such as at the restaurant, supermarket, or gas station. The slide presentations are used to provide a visual center for teacher narration, which is followed by commands, and for questions to students, such as “Which person in the picture is the salesperson?”. Reading and writing activities may also be employed to further consolidate structures and vocabulary, and as follow-ups to oral imperative drills.

Students have the primary roles of listener and performer. They listen attentively and respond physically to commands given by the teacher.

They are required to respond both individually and collectively, having little influence over the content of learning, since content is determined by the teacher, who must follow the imperative-based format for lessons. Students are also expected to recognize and respond to novel combinations of previously taught items.

It is the teacher who decides what to teach, who models and presents the new materials, and who selects supporting materials for classroom use. The teacher is encouraged to be well prepared and well organized so that the lesson flows smoothly and predictably. Asher recommends detailed lesson plans: “It is wise to write out the exact utterances you will be using and especially the novel commands because the action is so fast-moving there is usually not time for you to create spontaneously”. Classroom interaction and turn taking is teacher rather than learner directed. Even when learners interact with other learners it is usually the teacher who initiates the interaction:

Teacher: Maria, pick up the box of rice and hand it to Miguel and ask Miguel to read the price.

The teacher’s role is not so much to teach as to provide opportunities for learning. The teacher has the responsibility of providing the best kind of exposure to language so that the learner can internalize the basic rules of the target language. Thus the teacher controls the language input the learners receive, providing the raw material for the “cognitive map” that the learners will construct in their own minds. The teacher should also allow speaking abilities to develop in learners at the learners’ own natural pace.

In giving feedback to learners, the teacher should follow the example of parents giving feedback to their children. At first, parents correct very little, but as the child grows older, parents are said to tolerate fewer mistakes in speech. Similarly teachers should refrain from too much correction in the early stages and should not interrupt to correct errors, since this will inhibit learners. As time goes on, however, more teacher intervention is expected, as the learners’ speech becomes “fine tuned.”