Total Physical Response

This method is based on how the children learn their mother tongue and it was created by DR. James J. Asher.  The communication between parents and children combines linguistic and physical skills. The parents say something, for example “Give that ball” and the boy or girl responds to this doing the action. This happens for many years but even if the kid can’t speak he or she is internalizing the language. After this stage the child can reproduce language spontaneously.

For teaching a second language learning in preschool, TPR is the perfect method because kids gets actively involved in the lesson through action activities.  In the classroom the teacher has to start by saying a word (jump) or a phrase (Sit down) and demonstrating the action. Then the teacher says the command and the students do the action.  The most effective way is if the students are standing in a circle around the teacher and he/she encourage the children.

This is an example of how to explain the target vocabulary like  stand up, make a circle, turn around, walk , run , close your book …  This kind of exercise is really fun because children love moving around.Then you can introduce the game “Simons says” with this type of vocabulary. It consist in:

Students only can do the action when the teacher starts the sentence with "Simon say..." and then say an action for example Jump! so the children have to do the action. To add some difficulty the teacher can say "Your teacher says..." or "you say..." and the children have to notice that they can't do the action.

Another game could be introduce TPR in a storytelling so the children learn the linguistic structures that appear in the story  and get involved in it through the gestures. Then while the teacher is reading the story, they can represent the gestures.

A variations of any kind of TPR activitie is that the actions should be done by the students slowly or quickly, also you can include some action with left and right ( Hop on your left foot) as well as small or big (big or small jumps)

In the end, we can't forget that songs can be tought with TPR to make this resource more complete and fun. With songs you can teach a lot of actions such as claps, stomp, nod, shout, brush, wash ... 

For example you can use " If you're happy and you know it" song or " The wheels of the bus " song.

Try to apply this kind of activities in your classroom !