TPRS
Within language education, TPRS is increasingly becoming the topic of conversation. TPRS stands for Teaching Proficiency through Reading and Storytelling. The founder of this methodology is Blaine Ray, a former American Spanish teacher. He initially worked with TPR, but quickly came to the conclusion that the possibilities of TPR are limited. He resolved this by telling stories. After all, 'Storytelling' is a well-known technique for strengthening long-term memory.
Additionally, Blaine Ray based his approach on the principles of Stephen Krashen's theories of language acquisition. He refined his method in the 1990s and has since given many workshops and developed a lot of materials to help language teachers apply this approach in their classrooms.
He focuses on establishing an interactive and engaging learning environment in which students are provided with comprehensible input and ample repetition of key words and sentence structures, thus encouraging them to use and understand the target language through "story-asking" and "circling". The teacher and the students collaboratively create a story with a specific sentence structure. The students also write down these stories.
The teacher must ensure that the students remain interested by introducing variety in what they learn but also in vary in the questions that are asked. This way of asking questions is also referred to as "circling". Everything that is said must be comprehensible, so he often uses visuals, gestures, pictures, translations, ... .
Personally, I find TPRS not so easy to implement. It takes time to get the hang of it. Perhaps my aversion to this teaching method largely stems from my target audience of total beginners who have very little schooling experience (or are even illiterate). After all, I don't have a common language with my students, so they can't provide me with ideas themselves.
A variation of TPRS is TPRS with a story script. This approach is very useful for my target audience. Here, as a teacher, you determine how the story is constructed. The advantage is that you can use photos, allowing you to provide comprehensible input. But more important the students don't need to provide ideas themselves (which is not possible in a beginner group where the students lack sufficient vocabulary to provide ideas in the target language and don't have a common language with the teacher).
Additionally, Blaine Ray based his approach on the principles of Stephen Krashen's theories of language acquisition. He refined his method in the 1990s and has since given many workshops and developed a lot of materials to help language teachers apply this approach in their classrooms.
He focuses on establishing an interactive and engaging learning environment in which students are provided with comprehensible input and ample repetition of key words and sentence structures, thus encouraging them to use and understand the target language through "story-asking" and "circling". The teacher and the students collaboratively create a story with a specific sentence structure. The students also write down these stories.
The teacher must ensure that the students remain interested by introducing variety in what they learn but also in vary in the questions that are asked. This way of asking questions is also referred to as "circling". Everything that is said must be comprehensible, so he often uses visuals, gestures, pictures, translations, ... .
Personally, I find TPRS not so easy to implement. It takes time to get the hang of it. Perhaps my aversion to this teaching method largely stems from my target audience of total beginners who have very little schooling experience (or are even illiterate). After all, I don't have a common language with my students, so they can't provide me with ideas themselves.
A variation of TPRS is TPRS with a story script. This approach is very useful for my target audience. Here, as a teacher, you determine how the story is constructed. The advantage is that you can use photos, allowing you to provide comprehensible input. But more important the students don't need to provide ideas themselves (which is not possible in a beginner group where the students lack sufficient vocabulary to provide ideas in the target language and don't have a common language with the teacher).
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In this video, you see Blaine Ray himself 'in action'. He explains to teachers how to ask a story.
Unfortunately, he does not use a different demo-language and asks the questions in English. Moreover, the teachers behave like exemplary students who respond together and do exactly what he asks, making the lesson run very smoothly. Not really like in real life, therefore ! |
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In 2019, I attended a Language Lab French at the Agen conference. This language lab was led by Sabrina Sebban-Janczak, who masterfully controls the teaching method TPRS. I was and still am impressed by her way of teaching. She has taught me so much, and I have adopted many of her 'tricks'. In the video, I provide more explanations for what you see.
Special thanks to Sabrina Sebban-Jaczak and the participants visible in the video for granting permission to feature this video on my website! |
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