TPR

TPR should create an easy learning environment and the target of the teaching is the beginning learner. The goal of the TPR teaching method is to let the learners learning L2 in the way they learned their native language, just like an infant acquires its native language.

Q1: What are the goals of teachers who use TPR?

TPR was developed in order to reduce the stress people feel when studying foreign languages and thereby encourage students to persist in their study beyond a beginning level of proficiency.

Q2: What is the role of the teacher？ What is the role of the students?

The teacher is the director of all students’ behavior and the students are imitators of her nonverbal model.

Q3: What are some characteristics of the teaching/ learning process?

The first phase of the lesson is the teacher making modeling, and the second part of the lesson is that these same students demonstrate that they can understand the commands by performing them alone and teacher could repeat his or her oral command for several times and let the students be familiar with the vocabularies and then naturally speak them out.

Q4: What is the nature of student-teacher interaction? What is the nature of student-student interaction?

First the teacher interacts with the whole group verbally and with individual students, and the students respond nonverbally. Later on the students become more verbal and the teacher responds nonverbally.

Q5: How are the feeling of the students dealt with?

One of the primary ways this is accomplished is to allow learners to speak when they are ready and teachers should avoid pushing the students to speak and make the language learning as enjoyable as possible.

Q6: How is language viewed? How is culture viewed?

Just like the way the acquisition of the native language, the oral modality is primary. Culture is the lifestyle of people who speak the language natively.

Q7: What areas of language are emphasized? What language skills are emphasized?

Vocabulary and grammatical structures are emphasized over other language areas and they should be embedded within imperatives.

Q8: What is the role of the students’ native language?

TPR is usually introduced in the student’s native language.

Q9: How is evaluation accomplished?

Teacher could accomplish their evaluation to the students immediately through watching how the students react to the commands and could clearly see if the students had master the vocabularies and sentences.

Q10: How does the teacher respond to student errors?

It is normal that students made errors when they first begin speaking. Teachers should be tolerant of them and only correct major errors.