Total Physical Response in University EFL Listening Class

Ji Lingzhu and Dai Jiandong

Ji Lingzhu and Dai Jiandong are based at Taiyuan Normal University, Foreign
Langauge Department, Shanxi Province, P.R.China. Ji Lingzhu is an associate
professor and Dai Jiandong is a professor. Email: margie_ji@yahoo.com

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Abstract
Introduction
TPR is suitable for listening in theory
The study
TPR listening tasks used
Obeying instructions
TPR listening tasks involving physical movements
Listening and transferring information
Picture and drawing tasks
The findings
Discussion
Feasibilities
Limitations
Conclusions
References

Abstract

Total Physical Response (TPR) is a non-main stream teaching approach very popular
with young learners now. Since TPR emphasizes comprehension, postpones target
language reproduction to reduce immediate pressure on the learners, and its tasks can
accurately assess the learners’ listening comprehension ability, it is possible to apply it
in listening comprehension instruction with university EFL learners. This article
reports the application of TPR in university level EFL listening class: the kinds of
TPR listening activities used and the learners’ attitudes towards them. The results
show that TPR can be an effective approach with university freshmen in listening
comprehension, and it accelerates the target language processing if the learners have
good target language grammar foundation.

Introduction

Developed by James Asher, a professor of psychology at San Jose State University,

California, Total Physical Response is a language teaching method built around the
coordination of speech and action, and it attempts to teach language through physical
(motor) activity. Students listen to commands in a target language and then
immediately respond with an appropriate physical action. When those commands
become familiar, the teacher remains seated and only the students will continue to
respond to the teacher’s commands. From time to time, some novel utterances will be
given by recombining familiar elements together. The students do not have to respond
verbally until they are ready. The instructor mainly uses imperative sentences in
teaching. According to Asher (2000), most of the grammatical features in a language
can be nested in the imperative and that almost any grammatical constituent can be
taught through the skillful use of the imperative. There are many kinds of TPR
teaching activities: pointing, guessing, performing physical actions, picture work,
story telling and acting etc.

This model means that second language learning should be based on the model of first
language learning. It has three vital aspects: a). understanding the spoken language
must come before speaking, b). understanding is developed through body
movements , and c). the listening period creates a readiness to speak. (Asher,2000)

Stripped down to its essentials, it is a way of using movements, gestures and group dynamics
linked with spoken language in the form of commands, to create an atmosphere in which learners
quickly and easily acquire comprehension of new vocabulary and structures in a target language.
In the process, something called “impulse to language” also comes into play. (Cain, 2000)

TPR is suitable for listening comprehension in theory

1. Literally, listening comprehension means, I listen to the speaker and understands

what he/she says. TPR itself emphasizes listening comprehension. Asher’s emphasis
on developing comprehension first links himself to a movement in foreign language
teaching sometimes referred to as Comprehension Approach (Winitz 1981). The
Comprehension Approach scholars share the belief that a) comprehension abilities
precede productive skills in learning a language; b) the learning of speech should be
delayed until comprehension skills are established; c) skills acquired through listening
transfer to other skills; and d) teaching should emphasize learner stress-free
environment etc. In children’s acquisition of their first languages, immediately after
birth when parents and others utter directions to the infants such as “look at mommy!”
“look at daddy”. The infant responds with a physical action which shows that he
comprehends the utterances. So we can see that infants actually comprehend the
language before they are able to talk. Therefore if our foreign language learners
respond to what they hear with correct physical movements, they are demonstrating
that they understand what they hear.

2. Many of our students complain that whenever they have listening comprehension
class, they feel very nervous because the recording is usually played only once and
then they will be asked to do some exercises to show how much they understand.
Therefore we often find learners do a very poor job in the exercises, but they are
actually not that poor. They report that the more they concentrate, the more nervous
they become, and the less they remember. For the foreign language learners, they are
often in the transactional listening atmosphere, listening to the recording in the
classroom instead of live conversations and speeches. There aren’t many
paralinguistic signals such as nodding, gesturing and eyeball contacts in the
recordings, which to some extent affects their comprehension. Neither do they have
opportunity to confirm what they hear with the speaker. That is why they cannot give
their best performance in the stressful environment. TPR provides a stress-free
environment. The usual transactional listening is to some extent changed into
interactional listening. The tape recorder or the listening teacher becomes the
instructor and the learners become the performers. The teaching becomes interaction
between the instructor and the performers. The learners feel fully relaxed. As Morley
(1991) points out that all of the listening activities have a ‘listen-and-do” format,
which becomes almost a prototype for designing listening activities in the classroom.
“Listen-and-do” is just what TPR emphasizes. Therefore TPR activities can be turned
into listening tasks.

3. The traditional listening tasks, such as answering questions, True or False etc,
often include measurement errors, factors other than listening comprehension are
checked and tested (Thompson 1995). Listeners may have understood what was being
said at the time of listening, but by the time they come to the task questions, the
memory trace has been erased by the subsequent information in the text, and also by
having to read the questions and answering them because the aural information does
not stay in the short term memory for a long time. Listeners are discouraged from not
being able to answer the questions, and teachers misunderstand the learners’
comprehension ability because they judge from the answers. Those who fail to supply
the answers are not at the same proficiency level. Some don’t understand at all. Some
understand, but forget the necessary information to answer the questions. But
unfortunately our listening tasks cannot tell this difference.

There are some other very demanding listening tasks like drawing inferences,
constructed and open-ended questions. The listeners are not directly tested on what
they hear. They need to have one more comprehending process. Failures of this kind
of tasks have two implications: the listeners either do not understand the text, or their
cognitive operation fails them. Constructed responses have heavier memory and
production requirements. For correct responses, we know that the listeners correctly
comprehended the text; but the wrong answers don’t always mean that the learners
cannot understand the text. More problems arise with open-ended questions: more
than one answer can be interpreted as correct. These tasks are more of a test of
memory than a measure of meaningful comprehension, and they are often perceived
by the students as a boring activity and simply another vehicle for studying grammar
and vocabulary.(Thompson 1995)

The traditional listening tasks test more than just listening comprehension. Extra
demand is usually placed on the learners’ memory and oral production. TPR activities
usually require the learners to demonstrate their comprehension of the listening tasks
directly with physical movements or other actions, not with speaking and writing in
the target language. Instructors can accurately access the learners’ understanding and
instantly adjust the difficulty level of the input language and the delivery speed.

The study

The study was conducted in English Department, Taiyuan Normal University, PR

China with a group of 74 freshman English majors. All of them learned English as a
subject for six years before starting their university life. Those who were from cities
reported that their English teachers often used English as the medium of instruction in
class, and those who were from the rural areas said that their teachers seldom spoke
English in class.

The instructor and the students met twice a week, four teaching hours altogether.
Every time we met, we spent about 10-15 minutes completing two TPR listening
activities before returning to the listening textbook. The study lasted from late
September,2001 to Mid-January, 2002. I tried TPR listening with another group of
freshmen in our department in 2003 for one month, and a group of seniors for about
one month in 2004.

TPR listening tasks used

There are two categories of TPR activities which can be used in listening
comprehension: obeying instruction and information transfer.

Obeying instructions

Two main kinds of response activities are suggested here: performing physical
movements and model building.

In first language, people perform listening tasks in order to maintain communication.

In other words, they listen for non-linguistic reasons., and they may be required to do
something while or immediately after they listen. And they can make response
quickly without thinking, because children’s response in first language is innate. The
activities in this category require learners to respond non-linguistically. By doing so,
the English EFL listeners can respond physically without being pushed to rely on their
memories and to give oral production. As we all know, at the beginning of learning a
foreign language, learners may not understand or express themselves very well. The
only thing they do is listening and repeating. But they can understand the meaning if
the teacher demonstrate while she/he is speaking. On the other hand, when the teacher
gives instructions and makes the students do as she/he orders, the correct physical
response can not only practice their listening comprehension, but also prove that they
have understood the teacher.

TPR listening tasks involving physical movements

You are going to hear the teacher of a keep-fit exercise class giving instructions to
participants while they do the warm-up exercises.

Right, everybody. Stand up straight. Now bend forward and down to touch your
toes---and up---and down ---and up. Arms by your sides. Raise your right knee as
high as you can. Hold your leg with both hands and pull your knee back against your
body. Keep your backs straight. Now lower your leg and do the same with your right
knee---up---pull towards you---and raise your arms to shoulder level. Squeeze your
fists tightly in front of your chest. Now push your elbows back---keep your head up!
And relax…Feet together, and put your hands on your hips. Now bend your knees and
stretch your arms out to the sides at shoulder height, palms up. Rotate your arms in
small circles---That’s right---and now the other way. Now stand with your hands
clasped behind your neck and your legs apart. Bend over to the left, slowly, but as far
as you can. And slowly up. And down to the right. And up. OK---if we are all warmed
up now, let’s begin! (Zhang,2000 P102-103)

For this kind of tasks, the teacher can do the actions while she/he is speaking. Then
the learners may do the actions together with the teacher, and they usually find that
they are a bit slower than the teacher, but later most students find that they can
completely understand these target language instructions and follow the teacher
closely in doing the actions. There is varying degrees of complexity with this kind of
activities. At it its simplistic, it may be a command like “Sit down” or “Touch your
left toe.” At the other extreme, learners may hear complicated instructions just like the
example given above. The commands may be given in many variations to add variety
to your activity, such as the traditional Simon Says game; Do as I say but not as I do;
and Do as I do, but not as I say etc.

Constructing models

Paper-cutting, doll-making and block building are all good model-constructing

listening activities. The material we choose should be easily obtained or the
components should be easily and neatly assembled. You can add complexity by
adding the number and colour to your components.

The same set of components can be used for a number of different patterns and further
items can be introduced to add interest after two or three patterns have been made. For
advanced students, quite complicated models can be the basis of the activity. It is, of
course, more motivating if the exercise leads to the production of something which
students can use and perhaps keep.

Listening and transferring information

In contrast to previous examples, activities in this category do not demand that

students respond physically to what they hear. In addition, students are asked to put
pictures in order or transfer what they hear to the form of a table, chart or diagram.
Taking down a telephone message is also included in this category. The learners are
still required to look for specific types of meaning. For the young learners, they are
often asked to do the non-linguistic transformation of the heard information, and the
tasks include mostly picture work.

For adult learners, they are cognitively mature in native language thinking. We can
make good use of what they already have in their mind. We may choose a short text
that has to processed intensively or a longer text that has to be scanned. The tasks for
the adult learners may be linguistic or non linguistic with only a little linguistic
production demand, such as transferring the heard information to a chart, form,
diagram, maps, ground maps, grids, family trees, graphs etc.

Picture and drawing tasks

Picture dictation and colouring

This kind of tasks are more popular with young learners because they enjoy drawing
and are less critical of the standard of their results. (Ur,1984) As for the elder learners,
the teacher may ask them to draw more things and make the positions of things and
directions more complicated.

Completing pictures

There is an outline picture with a few items drawn. The learners are asked to listen
and draw in the rest. This is similar to drawing pictures. For adult learners, more
complicated pictures should be adopted. The teacher may use landscape or
architectural maps, too.

Identification and selection

This requires students to hear a description or a conversation and decide, from the
selection offered, which picture is the right one. The most common pictures used are
drawings (photos) of people or scenes, indoors or outdoors.

The learners may have also several pictures and listen to one short description or
dialogue, and then decide the dialogue or description matches which picture.
Alternatively, the learners may hold just one picture and listen to two or three short
descriptions and dialogues. The teacher can also present the task in various disguises:
to identify a wanted person or stolen car described in a radio message. This is a kind
of activity where the level of difficulty can be changed both by the degree of
similarity or contrast between the pictures and by the level of sophistication of the
description according to the target language proficiency of the learners. Students are
supposed to mark on their pictures the things which are different from what they hear.

Finding mistakes in pictures

This activity requires students to listen to the teacher or the recorder attentively, and
try to find out mistakes in the pictures, that is, to tell the differences between the given
picture and the one being described. This is a type of activity that students find
enjoyable. It is in fact a slightly more sophisticated version of the True or False
exercise, but more communicative than the written T or F statements because the
learners only need to focus on meaning. The teacher can either use purely pictures or
drawings, or add some words, phrases or sentences.

Sequencing

This is a variation of the type of identification and selection. Learners now must
identify successive pictures that are described or mentioned, in order to place them in
their correct sequence. To make this kind of exercises more complicated, we may add
the number and the similarity degree of pictures, increase the language complexity
and raise the delivery speed to a more difficulty level.

Locating and following a route

In this kind of activity, the learners are required to place items not into a sequence, but
into their appropriate location, e.g. On a plan of a house or a town. Alternatively they
may listen to a description and trace the route being described. The nature of the
language input can vary here. For example, it may consist of direct instructions which
learners have to carry out; a spoken description of a scene; a conversation between
two people who are discussing where to put furniture in a room or telling others about
a recent journey and so on (Littlewood, 1981). Various types of maps, completeness
of information, the number of features and compatibility of the information presented
in the text help the teachers to decide the difficulty level of the task.
The findings

The purpose of my study is to find out if TPR could be used for listening
comprehension with university learners, and whether the university level EFL learners
accept this kind of listening activities. I did not do any pre or post tests , only
observed and interviewed the students during and after the study.

The freshmen enjoyed TPR activities very much. Sometimes I designed one TPR task
and one traditional task for the same recording, and the learners often performed
much better with TPR. Here are some of their comments:
“With TPR, I am not as nervous as before. I can understand more.”
“Previously when the speaker said the second sentence, I was still thinking about the
Chinese meaning of the first sentence. Now I am much faster, and neither do I often
translate anything I hear into Chinese for comprehension.”
“ The pronunciation of a word I hear is very much different from its pronunciation I
knew. Now I can match the sounds of most of the words I hear with the sounds of
them I knew, so listening is easier for me now.”

Form the faces of the seniors, I can see that they did not enjoy TPR as much as the
freshmen:
“The listening passages are OK, but not very challenging. The tasks are a bit
childish”.
“ There doesn’t seem to be a purpose for this kind listening since after listening we
don’t discuss, neither can we express our ideas.”
This may partly be caused by the TPR tasks we used because we only used the same
set of tasks and didn’t design any new complicated tasks for them.

Discussion

Feasibility

TPR at present is mainly used in the young learners’ language teaching. Just as what
Dr. Asher mentioned that young English learners’ listening comprehension ability
improved very quickly. Some of the capable learners can even acquire a near native
pronunciation and intonation( Asher 2000) . The TPR activities designed for the adult
learners are much more complicated, and we find that they often improved quickly.
They enjoy this kind of listening activities and report that they don’t feel tired and
nervous at all, and they actually can do much more than in the traditional listening
class. One reason may be that TPR method itself is stress-free. The learners are not
under the immediate pressure of linguistic production in the target language. Another
reason may be that the learners have already internalized the grammatical rules of
English sentences. Their reading comprehension ability is much better than their
speaking and listening. What they hear activates what they have already known in
their minds.

Although Chinese university learners studied English for quite a long time in
secondary schools, most of them only studied for examinations, so their
communicative ability in English has not been developed very well, and the target
language processing speed is very slow although they know the pattern of the target
language, the sounds morphology, syntax and semantics. TPR listening activities add
meaning to the previous language form they knew. The combination of meaning and
form of the target language accelerates the processing speed. The learners’ mental
translation time is shortened to a great extent.

This result coincides with a Japanese example. The university EFL professors use
TPR and the study of grammar together to teach Japanese adult learners. These
students have little contacts with spoken English before. The techniques used in TPR
help expand their communication skills in English. Later, they found these two
techniques work very well together. Grammar is a supplemental tool in the process of
acquiring communication skills. By studying grammar, learners could also learn the
correct spelling and pronunciation of each word they have been exposed to aurally in
the TPR part of the lesson.

Limitations

Of course there are some limitations. First of all, just as some researchers mentioned
that the non-verbal response listening tasks are very effective for lower proficiency
level learners because TPR listening activities are confined to some special types of
texts: instructions, commands, narration of actions, descriptions, stories and plays etc.
They tend to neglect other aural passages such as conversation, announcements,
lectures, debates, speeches and advertisements etc. Secondly, TPR listening activities
don’t seem to cultivate listeners’ advanced listening skills such as drawing inference,
predicting and listening for the main ideas, neither are they good for integrated
teaching such listening and speaking, listening and writing. This is due to the flaws of
TPR method itself. It is difficult for ordinary people to express abstract ideas with
actions and drawings although Dr. Asher sees language as being composed of
abstractions and non-abstractions with non-abstractions being most specially
represented by concrete nouns and imperative verbs. He believes that learners can
acquire a “detailed cognitive map” as well as the “grammatical structure of a
language” without recourse to abstractions. Thirdly, TPR listening tasks often come
together with actions or other non-linguistic visual aids, such as pictures and maps
etc. So they are only those “listening and making no linguistic response” and
“listening and making short response” tasks. It is difficult for us to design any TPR
“listening and making longer response and “listening as a basis for study and
discussion” tasks. (Ur, 1984). These activities don’t help learners to “reformulate and
evaluate information contained in the spoken text” ( Littlewood, 1981). According to
Morley (1991), listening activities usually fall into six categories: 1) listening and
doing actions; 2) listening and choosing; 3) listening and transferring information; 4)
listening and evaluating and manipulating information; 5) interactive listening; 6)
listening for enjoyment and sociability. TPR listening activities can only cover the
first three categories. Another problem is that if the teachers use TPR for a long time
without switching to other activities, they can be very ineffective. In our three and
half months, we tried five time to use a series of TPR activities for over 50 minutes,
only finding that our students were bored and returned to unwilling state again.

Conclusions

Just like any other main stream teaching approaches, TPR has both its advantages and
disadvantages. It emphasizes comprehension and reduces the production pressure on
the learners, therefore they feel very much at ease in TPR class, and accelerates the
cognitive processing in the target language, especially with the learners who have a
good command of grammatical rules. Learners from rural areas who previously
seldom listened to spoken English improved their listening comprehension ability in
English very quickly with TPR activities. Just as what they reported that they did not
have to translate every word into Chinese to help them understand.

However it is confined to limited genres, which restricts the designing of classroom

tasks. The result is learners’ advanced listening skills, such as drawing inferences,
cannot be cultivated. All these decide that TPR works with early stages of learning
regardless of learners’ ages, and also with advanced learners in listening
comprehension when they encounter certain types of texts. For classroom
practitioners, TPR presents a useful set of techniques compatible with other
approaches to teaching.

References

Asher, J. 2000. Year 2000 Update for the Total Physical Response, known worldwide
as TPR. Retrieved June 30, 2003 from the World Wide Web:
http://www.tprsource.com/asher.htm

Cain. R (2000). Total Physical Response, ET Professional, Issue 14.

Littlewood, W. 1981. Communicative language teaching. Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press.

Min Duk-ki, 1996. Teaching English to Children: Focused on Listener’s Response.

http://www.kapee.org/tex/content7.htm

Morley, J. 1991. Listening comprehension in second/foreign language instruction[A].

In M. Celce-Murcial(Ed.), teaching English as a second or foreign language
(2nd,ed),81-106. New York: Newbury House.

Romi, T. 2001. Total Physical Response in the Classroom. http://si.unm.edu/web/

Thompson, I. 1995. ‘Assessment of Second/Foreign Language Listening

comprehension’ in A Guide for the teaching of Second Language Listening.

Mendelsohn and Rubin (ed.)Dominie Press , Inc .USA.

Ur, P. 1984. Teaching listening comprehension. Cambridge: Cambridge University

Press.

Winitz, H. 1981. The comprehension approach to foreign language instruction.

Cambridge: Newbury House Publishers.

Zhang, M. 2000. Step by Step 2. Shanghai: East China Normal University Publishing
House.

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