I first encountered TPRS (Teaching Proficiency through Reading and Storytelling – previously called Total Physical Response Storytelling) just before I started my Cambridge DELTA and decided to use it for the Experimental Practice assignment. I still remember my tutor saying, ‘I have been training on courses for 10 years, and I have never heard of TPRS.’ Rather than putting me off, this made me more determined. This blog is a reflection of the last 15 years of my using TPRS, including it in our Trinity CertTESOL course, and actively building our beginner curriculum around storytelling.

TPRS was created by a Spanish teacher in the USA called Blaine Ray. He was using TPR, but soon his students became bored with only TPR. Then, with some input from Stephen Krashen, he combined storytelling with TPR, and TPRS was born. It grew in popularity, but despite this growth it is still predominantly taught at TPRS events rather than in teacher training courses and hasn’t really entered academic discourse as much as I personally feel it should.

While we use many components of TPRS, there are some parts of the methodology in its purest form that I am not completely convinced of. I discuss problems with TPRS in this blog only to clarify why we have adapted the approach, but the bulk of it is dedicated to what TPRS is, how we have adapted it, and how you could include storytelling as a means of comprehensible input into your own lessons. And before I venture into this, the main reason we do storytelling is because it is such a communicative driven method if used correctly. There is lots of interaction, meaning driven comprehensible input, and opportunities to focus on communication and meaning even as a beginner.

 

TPRS in the classroom

 

The description of TPRS in these few paragraphs to follow is very limited and I strongly suggest you explore it in more depth, and practice smaller parts of it before making a judgment on its effectiveness.

TPRS starts with the teacher selecting 2 or 3 phrases (I like apples rather than apples, or has a badminton racket – doesn’t have a tennis racket, rather than racket or the sports in isolation) and then clarifying the meaning. This clarification can be done through TPR, and is often what we do when we use TPR. This is followed by personalisation, where these phrases are used in ask and answer type activities with students. For example, ‘Peter, do you have a badminton racket?’ ‘No.’ ‘Peter doesn’t have a badminton racket. Peter, do you have a tennis racket?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Peter has a tennis racket. Peter doesn’t have a badminton racket. What colour is your tennis racket?’ This personalisation is important because it allows you to build the story you will tell later around your students, but also gets them to process and show comprehension of the target language before the lesson starts.

This is then followed by the telling of a story. While it is not a prerequisite, we have stories pre-written focusing on the structures we have highlighted, and the details in the story are then changed during the telling of the story. I have underlined the parts of the story where changes can take place. These stories are often 3-part stories where in the first two parts, there is no resolution, but in the third part there is.

Example story

Gerhard has a new tennis racket. He wants to play tennis. He asks his friend Mark, ‘Do you want to play tennis?’ Mark says, ‘Yes, I want to play tennis, but I don’t have a tennis racket. I have a badminton racket.’ Gerhard is sad.

Gerhard and Mark go to Sam’s house. Gerhard says, ‘I have a new tennis racket. I want to play tennis. Do you want to play tennis?’ Sam says, ‘I want to play tennis, but I don’t have any tennis balls. I have a tennis racket.’ Gerhard and Sam are sad. Mark says, ‘I don’t have a tennis racket, but I have 50 tennis balls.’

Mark, Sam, and Gerhard go to the tennis courts. Gerhard says, ‘I have a new tennis racket. I want to play tennis.’ The man at the tennis courts says, ‘Do you have tennis balls?’ Mark says, ‘We have two rackets, and we have 50 balls.’ The man says, ‘Good.’ Mark, Sam and Gerhard play tennis at the tennis courts. They are happy.

You can easily in the telling of the story replace a tennis racket with, for example, a basketball, and the person might not have shoes. These details are asked for during the telling of the story, by asking what, where, who type questions. Where can they play tennis? Who has a racket? What does Mark have?

Part 3 is very simple. They read the story from which you built the oral story. The similarities between the two stories greatly increase comprehension. The aim should be to have zero (0) unknown words in the stories by the time they start reading.  The reading can take various forms, for example, a class reading, or volleyball reading, which is a translation activity and actually very effective in terms of processing sentences at sentence level rather than at word level. In short, student A reads a sentence from the story, and student B translates it. The student B reads the next sentence and student A translates it. This can also be done in smaller groups.

 

 

 

My issues with TPRS

 

It is very important to have a comprehensible classroom, especially while students are still acquiring syntax. We acquire basic syntax before morphology, and this is one of the reasons I really like storytelling as a key component of language learning for lower levels. However, we often vastly overestimate how well we are able to judge what students understand or don’t understand. My gripe with TPRS in this area is that I have often seen teaching demonstrations or read articles where I feel they are over translating.

You don’t have to translate absolutely every new item, because at times, it detracts from the lesson.

I remember very early on in my TPRS journey watching a video of a person showing how good TPRS was. Their students had written a part of a story after only 2 hours of instruction. And I was impressed. Very impressed to be honest. But then I read and heard over and over not to push or force output. In my experience, especially with teenagers and older children, and obviously adults, there is no better way to realise, on your own, what you don’t know than by being asked to speak another language and realising you need a word, or you lack control of a certain structure. Through that process, we become much more likely to notice that structure or word the next time someone else uses it, especially if it falls within our receptive language range, but not within our productive range just yet. The complete dismissal of Swain’s Output hypothesis or claims that listening to a classmate telling a story corrupts language acquisition, or dismissing proven methods like TBL, seems to me a bit uninformed. And the most annoying is telling people not to do something (output) while actually doing it (through retells and story writing) and not noticing the impact this actually has on the methodology.

You can force output and in fact we do so from very early on. Especially spoken output in the form of retelling stories, but we recognise the importance of retelling a story as a means of generating output.

TPRS seems most effective up to A2. And that is exactly up to which level we use lots of stories and storytelling. But beyond that (CEFR B1 and above) the language complexity that is required is just not covered well enough in stories. Dismissing everything non-TPRS as ‘legacy methods’ and failure to recognise the actual student group with which TPRS studies were done seems intellectually dishonest to me.

You should absolutely use storytelling, and tools from TPRS like ‘circling questions,’ and ‘pop up grammar’ rather than explicit structured grammar teaching, but if tasks and communication are completely ignored, then we have to start wondering if we are honest with ourselves.

TPRS is a registered trademark. And while that might seem like a minor issue, I cannot understand why it would be necessary to register a trademark for a teaching methodology. We use a storytelling approach at my school, in fact, as mentioned earlier, our entire curriculum is built around it. Our phonics program works miles better, because children have some syntactical and productive control over the language before we teach phonics. We teach phonics as a means of decoding and learning to read, rather than as an avenue for learning English. Certainly, if I trademarked that, it would appear silly. I realise the need to protect the name TPRS, and the likelihood that unscrupulous people might publish training and books using the name TPRS, but in has also had a significantly negative impact in my own opinion, about the uptake of what is a fantastic method of language teaching.

 

 

How we use storytelling

 

So, how do we use storytelling?

Our storytelling lessons for complete beginners are divided into three separate 1-hour lessons.

In the first lesson, key words or phrases are clarified and practiced, including through personalisation, basically identical to TPRS. Often, these words and phrases include phonics. For example, when focusing on short a phonics, we might have phrases like ‘has a cat.’ In personalisation, we will have questions like ‘Do you have a cat? Do you want a cat? Do you want a black cat? Who has a cat?’ Note here the consistent occurrence of not only the target structure, but also the phoneme we are focusing on. This is then followed by an oral story often with the use of a video or pictures as contextual support.

In the second lesson, we review the oral story and then we read the story and do activities like ‘Teacher, you’re wrong’ where the teacher reads the story and makes a ‘mistake’ that the students ‘correct.’ Something like, ‘the monkey has a banana.’ ‘Teacher, you’re wrong. The monkey has an apple.’ We also do ‘Volleyball reading’ which is described above.

In lesson three, we use pictures from the story as a basis for retelling the story. This also allows children to add lots of details on their own which gives us an indication of what they have mastered and what areas of language we need to focus on. For example, if in our story there is a boy, and the sentence is, ‘John is at the park,’ but there is no description in our story of John, then students can look at the pictures and add details like ‘John has black hair. John is a boy. He has a T-shirt. The t-shirt is blue.’ You will notice the very basic nature of these sentences. It also means we notice things like ‘He T-shirt have yellow star,’ which allows us to add that pattern to a future story when we tell the story.

When we feel that students have enough language to be engaged in easier tasks, we start combining tasks and storytelling, until they get to pre-intermediate from which we focus more on exam skills, skills-based teaching, and TBL. This means they have solid syntactical control before we start worrying about morphology, and enough control over language to actually engage in TBL in a meaningful manner.

 

 

 

Looking forward

TPRS is a fairly unknown methodology, perhaps due to some of the reasons I mentioned in this blog, but I personally feel it is a fantastic tool to have in your teacher toolbox and something that should be used much more frequently with beginners. In fact, we use it in our Chinese classes for adults and the results have been outstanding. I would strongly encourage you to start on a storytelling or TPRS journey, if you are not already on one.

 

 

 

References

Articles

Oliver, J.S. (2012). Investigating Storytelling Methods in a Beginning-Level College Class. The Language Educator, February 2012. Oliver, J.S. (2013).

Spangler, D.E. (2009). Effects of two foreign language methodologies, communicative language teaching and teaching proficiency through reading and storytelling, on beginning-level students’ achievement, fluency, and anxiety. Doctoral dissertation. Walden University, Minneapolis, MN.

Varguez, K. C. (2009). Traditional and TPR Storytelling Instruction in the Beginning High School Classroom. International Journal of Foreign Language Teaching, 5:1 (Summer), 2-11

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Books

Ray, B., & Seely, C. (1998). Fluency Through TPR Storytelling. (2nd ed.) Berkeley, CA: Command Performance Language Institute and Bakersfield, CA: Blaine Ray Workshops

Swain, M. (1985). Communicative competency: Some roles of comprehensible input and comprehensible output in its development. In Gass S. and Madden C. (eds.) Input in second language acquisition (pp.235-253). Rowley, Mass: Newbury House.

Swain, M. (2005). The output hypothesis: theory and research. In E. Hinkel (Ed.), Handbook of research in second language teaching and learning (pp. 471-483). Yahweh, N.J: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.