Total Physical Response (TPR)

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romeo.alpha
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Re: Total Physical Response (TPR)

Postby romeo.alpha » Fri Mar 01, 2019 1:40 pm

Cainntear wrote:I was referring to your previous post, but I misremembered it. Regardless, nothing you’ve said is TPR, and what you were replying to was my comment on why TPR doesn’t work. You responded by suggesting how to “moderate”... by not doing TPR, which only supports my point that TPR is a poor methodology to build an entire course on.


TPR includes the students saying the word as they perform the action. Suggesting that saying "jump" while you jump is TPR, but saying "I jump" or "I am jumping" while you jump is not TPR is absurd.
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Re: Total Physical Response (TPR)

Postby Cainntear » Fri Mar 01, 2019 2:55 pm

romeo.alpha wrote:
Cainntear wrote:I was referring to your previous post, but I misremembered it. Regardless, nothing you’ve said is TPR, and what you were replying to was my comment on why TPR doesn’t work. You responded by suggesting how to “moderate”... by not doing TPR, which only supports my point that TPR is a poor methodology to build an entire course on.


TPR includes the students saying the word as they perform the action. Suggesting that saying "jump" while you jump is TPR, but saying "I jump" or "I am jumping" while you jump is not TPR is absurd.

OK, fine, but if you hop from topic to topic without explaining the links, it gets very confusing and makes it extremely difficult to follow your train of thought.
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Re: Total Physical Response (TPR)

Postby languist » Sat Mar 02, 2019 10:21 pm

reineke wrote:

Fun video.

"Enables infant brains to create another centre of speech (in addition to the mother tongue) that will stay with them for the rest of their lives; speech centre creation stops at an early age;"
https://www.wattsenglish.com/about-wattsenglish/


This was the video that motivated me to teach little kids languages! So much energy but so much fun!
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romeo.alpha
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Re: Total Physical Response (TPR)

Postby romeo.alpha » Sun Mar 03, 2019 10:28 pm

Cainntear wrote:OK, fine, but if you hop from topic to topic without explaining the links, it gets very confusing and makes it extremely difficult to follow your train of thought.


Going from performing an action while speaking an imperative to performing an action while describing it is barely a sidestep. If a link like that needs to be explained in detail every time it will simply make text unbearably dense.
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Re: Total Physical Response (TPR)

Postby Cainntear » Mon Mar 04, 2019 7:38 pm

romeo.alpha wrote:
Cainntear wrote:OK, fine, but if you hop from topic to topic without explaining the links, it gets very confusing and makes it extremely difficult to follow your train of thought.


Going from performing an action while speaking an imperative to performing an action while describing it is barely a sidestep. If a link like that needs to be explained in detail every time it will simply make text unbearably dense.

When I questioned it on the grounds that it didn't model real language use (which it doesn't) you immediately jumped to talking about recounting a story in the present historic. That's what I mean about finding it difficult to follow your logic. You never once addressed my concerns with the technique without a fundamental, radical change of topic.
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romeo.alpha
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Re: Total Physical Response (TPR)

Postby romeo.alpha » Thu Mar 07, 2019 2:49 pm

Cainntear wrote:When I questioned it on the grounds that it didn't model real language use (which it doesn't) you immediately jumped to talking about recounting a story in the present historic. That's what I mean about finding it difficult to follow your logic. You never once addressed my concerns with the technique without a fundamental, radical change of topic.


You're wrong, it does, I immediately jumped to showing how it does in fact model real language usage. The construction is exactly the same, context establishes whether you're talking about the past or the present. If you're not standing outside a 7-Eleven and you say "So I'm standing outside a 7-Eleven..." everyone listening immediately knows you're telling a story. If you just look at the quote without any context, you could just as well believe it's a real time narration.
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Re: Total Physical Response (TPR)

Postby Cainntear » Thu Mar 07, 2019 4:50 pm

romeo.alpha wrote:
Cainntear wrote:When I questioned it on the grounds that it didn't model real language use (which it doesn't) you immediately jumped to talking about recounting a story in the present historic. That's what I mean about finding it difficult to follow your logic. You never once addressed my concerns with the technique without a fundamental, radical change of topic.


You're wrong, it does, I immediately jumped to showing how it does in fact model real language usage. The construction is exactly the same, context establishes whether you're talking about the past or the present. If you're not standing outside a 7-Eleven and you say "So I'm standing outside a 7-Eleven..." everyone listening immediately knows you're telling a story. If you just look at the quote without any context, you could just as well believe it's a real time narration.

The construction is the same, but the usage is very much not. The only place where a narrative present simple works in natural use is sports commentary.

The meaning is obscured, because unless you explain in a language they understand (which is certainly not part of TPR) there is no way the students can know that you're telling them a narrative tense and not a confusingly different form of the imperative. Even if they do manage to intuit somehow that it's a narrative tense, there's no way for them to know how rare it is in real use.
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Re: Total Physical Response (TPR)

Postby jonathanrace » Sat Mar 09, 2019 9:36 am

It definitely helps with children. Even if you could argue that it doesn't directly help them learn, the fact that the students are more engaged in the material helps tremendously and can make things more fun.

I actually started using this a little with my own studies and I found it helpful in the early stages of vocabulary acquisition. I do it less now but still useful for obvious things like parts of the body etc.
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Re: Total Physical Response (TPR)

Postby Cainntear » Sat Mar 09, 2019 11:20 am

jonathanrace wrote:It definitely helps with children. Even if you could argue that it doesn't directly help them learn, the fact that the students are more engaged in the material helps tremendously and can make things more fun.

I actually started using this a little with my own studies and I found it helpful in the early stages of vocabulary acquisition. I do it less now but still useful for obvious things like parts of the body etc.

I don't think anyone has said, or would say, that it doesn't help students learn -- it clearly does.

The argument against TPR is about what it teaches, and what you've just said agrees with what I always say: it teaches vocabulary very well... it's just that it can only teach a very small section of grammar.

And one thing about teaching to kids is that unless you're in an environment where there are a lot of native speakers and the kids are going to interact with them regularly, you're going to struggle to teach them grammar anyway -- language lessons for under-10s are little more than vocabulary lessons in reality.
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Re: Total Physical Response (TPR)

Postby romeo.alpha » Mon Mar 11, 2019 5:36 pm

Cainntear wrote:
The meaning is obscured, because unless you explain in a language they understand (which is certainly not part of TPR) there is no way the students can know that you're telling them a narrative tense and not a confusingly different form of the imperative. Even if they do manage to intuit somehow that it's a narrative tense, there's no way for them to know how rare it is in real use.


That has nothing to do with the problem of people using TPR being seen as too rude because they overuse the imperative. They can learn the usage later, and their habit will be to narrate rather than give orders, which means they'll not be perceived as rude.
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