Total Physical Response in University EFL Listening Class
Ji Lingzhu and Dai Jiandong, China
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
Menu
Abstract
Introduction
TPR is suitable for listening in theory
The study
TPR listening tasks used
Obeying instructions
TPR listening tasks involving physical movements
Constructing models
Listening and transferring information
Picture and drawing tasks
The findings
Discussion
Feasibilities
Limitations
Conclusions
References
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.
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)
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 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.
There are two categories of TPR activities which can be used in listening comprehension: obeying instruction and information transfer.
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.
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.
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.
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 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 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.
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.
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.
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.
Asher, J. 2000. Year 2000 Update for the Total Physical Response, known worldwide as TPR. Retrieved June 30, 2003 from the World Wide Web: 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. 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.
Please check the Teaching English for Academic Purposes course at Pilgrims website.
Please check the Creative Methodology for the Classroom course at Pilgrims website.
|
